Engineering an online community: lessons from a student-centred hack day

A chance to spend a whole day with twenty of our students, selected from over 140 volunteers, for a workshop to find ways of teaching them better: too good to miss. The workshop was run like a coding “hack day”: each team identifying a problem, then developing a solution, prototyping it, and pitching it to the whole group with votes and a prize for the best conception. It was intense and fun (as hopefully comes across from the Twitter posts during the day), but for me the strongest sign of something important happening was that the problem my team chose to work on was not something I’d have guessed at all, despite my many years working in the field: testimony to the power and importance of bringing students into the process.

What’s the biggest problem you face in your studying? we asked the two students in my team. Both of them in different ways pointed to the problem of isolation and the difficulty of contact with other students. The first wanted to be able to share impressions with others, to see how they were responding to the same questions; online forums should have helped her, but she found that other students didn’t reply to her posts, and that in general people tended just to post their own ideas, at length, without responding to others. Long travelling distances were an obstacle to her attending face-to-face tutorials. The second student, on a foreign language course, wanted to find other students with whom to practice speaking; online tutorials enabled this, but low attendance put extra pressure on those who did attend, with added stress when the technology was unreliable. Hearing them talk, I remembered that the problem of student isolation is THE fundamental problem of distance education. I’d forgotten it because the problem has been around for so long, and because we’ve made so many efforts to solve it; what I realised was that despite forty years and more of trying, with all the latest technology at our disposal, we still haven’t really cracked it.

In trying to address the problem of student isolation, I think we’ve been ill-served by academic talk about “community” and in particular “learning community”. In health and social care, “community” has become notorious as a fantasy concept: that thing for which we all long to alleviate our sense of alienation in an individualised and fragmented society – ignoring the fact that communities are not necessarily benign or supportive. In education too, there has been something of the same hippy-like dream of creating “learning communities”, as networks of cooperative sharing and the collaborative construction of knowledge. Efforts to document actual learning communities has not been accompanied by comparable analysis of how they can be deliberately created, sustained and developed, and instead there has been an unhealthy fixation on collaboration as the highest form of participation in a learning community, with less intense forms – such as mere cooperation, or sharing, or (worst of all) “lurking” - relegated to lower rungs on the hierarchy of community engagement.

Yet “community” can be a meaningful concept even if there is only identification and no interaction. I remember once commenting to a colleague that my wife and I were Trekkies, Star Trek fans. “Oh,” she said, “what do you do?” I think she imagined that we went to conventions dressed as Klingons or something, so she was rather disappointed by my answer: “Well, we watch the TV show, and we rather enjoy it.” When I told this story at the Hack Day, two other members of my team to my surprise enthusiastically self-identified as Trekkies, showing that even this minimal level of identification with a community can have social significance.

More importantly, there can be practical outcomes from even low levels of community engagement. When I’m working out at the gym, I don’t interact with other gym users, and I don’t particularly want to; yet I can see them doing what they’re doing, and the fact that they’re there and working out also gives a spur to my motivation and persistence. “Exactly,” said one of our students, when I made this comparison. He regularly went to his local university library to work, so as to be in the midst of other people at study – even if they were studying different things – which helped him work longer and harder than he would have done at home.

The critical point of insight for me came when I realised that he didn’t have this sense of working alongside others with the other students on his course. He had no perception of the other students in his geographical area, who would be potential partners for face-to-face language practice, for example. Ideas started to ping rapidly now: I had a vision of a Google maps display, showing the geographical location of other students on his course (for privacy reasons, probably limited to the first part of the postcode); a faculty colleague had a vision of a dating app, which matched students with similar “would like to meet” profiles in the same geographical area or with a willingness to meet online.

And so, with the assistance of a super-smart graphic designer, we mocked up a screenshot of our solution: a view of the student’s community as >the first< screen a student sees on entering the University’s online environment. It included:

• a map showing the locations (approximate for privacy reasons) of other students (either on the course, on the qualification, or in the OU), with roll-over pop-ups of their profiles (for those who have made their profile public), and the colour of the indicator showing when they are online
• a roster of designated “friends” or “buddies” with whom the student already has contact, with again a colour indicator showing when they are online
• an “Ask the community” message board, switchable between messaging students on the course, the qualification, and the OU as a whole (this was a more modest substitute for the “dating app”, though we still thought this was a good idea).

 

Our choice of student isolation as a problem was validated when we discovered that two other teams had also chosen to address it, though in very different ways: one conceived an app for instant messaging with other students or with a tutor, and the other aimed to improve the effectiveness of online forums. It was the app which won the popular vote at the end of the day, but we still thought our solution was a good one because it embodied three critical features, necessary for students to build their own community:

• mutual visibility of online presence (if you can’t see the community, you won’t interact with it)
• flexible levels of engagement (you can interact minimally or massively, or start small and build, or drop back if other pressures intervene)
• viable even with initial low participation (unlike an empty forum, the community is visible and invites interaction even before anyone has done anything).

And the best thing about our solution, we thought, is that it requires no new technology: just the common social media tools, already familiar to a good proportion of our students. It can be done right now. Now we just have the challenge of making it happen!

Why a tutorial is like Weightwatchers

Seeing an obituary of Jean Nidetch, the founder of Weightwatchers, reminded me of an Open University student whom I interviewed some years ago about her experience of study. She greatly valued contact with other students, but not for the reasons one might suppose, because she compared her tutorials to Weightwatchers meetings;

You come home with a little book every week, and it tells you, ... “this is what we’re concentrating on this week, and this is how to do it, and this is what we’re going to help you with, and don’t let people distract you, and da, da, da. ... Don’t let people try and make you eat cakes. Tell people that you’re doing this.” Like, “I’m studying, please don’t come in. I need this hour, it’s,” you know.... People need sort of chivvying, … they need a bit of support. And, er, WeightWatchers is very good at that. Very good at that.... That’s why you go to WeightWatchers once a week, so that w–, apart from the ritual humiliation of being weighed. Um. But you go, and there’s other people there, and you all chat in a queue and, you know, ... all girls together, or whatever it may be, which is similar to the tutorials.... In part the reason you go along is the moral support of seeing everyone else looking so depressed about the [next assignment]. Or whatever.

I think of this student whenever I hear colleagues getting pretentious about the importance of contact between students for collaborative knowledge construction. Weightwatchers meetings are not intended for collaborative knowledge construction, or even for sharing information, because the basic principle of dieting is brutally simple – you just eat fewer calories – and all the details of the proprietary system for calorie-counting and meal planning are contained in a handbook which comes with WeightWatchers membership. For this student, the most important aspect of her meetings was the group identity (“all girls together”) and the moral authority which it gave to resist social pressures.

So though students may share information with each other and may build knowledge collaboratively, it’s not necessarily the only or the most important aspect of their relationship with each other. Nor is their sense of community, if they develop one, necessarily founded on shared goals; more powerful may be “the ritual humiliation”, “seeing everyone else looking so depressed about the [next assignment]”. As Ursula Le Guin wrote many years ago: “brotherhood begins in shared pain.”

How Costa prompts feedback

Having a post-gym breakfast at my local Costa last week, I saw a poster asking for customer feedback which went beyond the ordinary.

One difficulty, when asking for any kind of feedback, is to prompt people to think without pre-disposing them in any particular direction. Another is to get them to give positive feedback, instead of only giving feedback when they've a complaint to make! What Costa have done - as part of the poster design, not the overt message - is to provide a set of stems, so that they tacitly suggest ways you might start your feedback while leaving the actual feedback up to you.

The stems include: "We found ...", "We were ...", "I wish ...", "Glad to see ...", "Thank you for ...", "Hope it ...", "I really felt ...", "Could you ...", "Really enjoyed ...".

This reminded me of Andrew Ravenscroft's Academic Talk / InterLoc project, which experimented with an online discussion interface which forced students to contribute to the discussion using one of a limited set of stems. (For example: “I think that…”, “I disagree because…”, “Is there any evidence that…”, “Why do you think that…”.) Interestingly, students found the constraint of their responses didn't inhibit them but actually enabled them to engage in more and deeper discussion.

I like Costa, so I hope the poster works just as well for them. My own feedback: great graphic design, and a model of customer engagement!

Reference
Simon McAlister, Andrew Ravenscroft, Eileen Scanlon, “Combining interaction and context design to support collaborative argumentation using a tool for synchronous CMC”, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 20 (2004), pp 194-204.

How to care for introverts / extroverts

This pair of wonderful diagrams has been circulating around the internet without source or acknowledgement – but as far as I can see the original designers are here, and we should acknowledge their brilliance.

For me, there are several reasons why these diagrams are great. First, they get right the meaning of introversion and extraversion. The popular misconception is that introverts are shy and don't get on with people, or are lacking in social skills, whereas extraverts (or extroverts, as it's now often spelled) are gregarious and get on with people splendidly. But in Jung’s original conception, introversion is a focus on the inner contents of one’s mind, and extraversion is a focus on external objects and the outside world. So extraverts get energy from other people, and introverts get energy from thinking. It isn’t that introverts don’t like other people or don’t know how to deal with them: it’s that they find them draining of energy (though not quite in the sense of this Dilbert cartoon). Introverts can be very socially skilled, though they’re unlikely ever to shine in a field such as telesales. It’s rare to find an extrovert with poor social skills (though they do exist), but it’s common to find extroverts who prefer to do their thinking by talking to other people.

The second reason these diagrams why these diagrams are great is that they’re actually useful. Most discussions of extraversion and introversion in pop psychology or HR literature focus on “finding your type” or working out where you are on the introversion-extraversion spectrum, but don't tell you what to do about it - except, usually, to imply that if you're an introvert you shouldn't be promoted into management or do any kind of job which involves working with people. (Hence the need for ripostes, such as Susan Cain's Quiet.) These diagrams address the problem that if you're an extrovert you probably don't know how extroverts like to be treated (and they're unlikely to tell you), and if you're an introvert you may know what extraverts like but don't have the confidence to do it for them. These are diagrams which offer the possibility of a better world.

And the third reason why these diagrams are great is of course that they're superb pieces of design. Pithy and memorable text, engagingly laid out. (I think the variation in type sizes forces one subconsciously to slow down and pay more attention while reading the text, hence encouraging one to pay attention to what it actually says.) Writers and designers of motivational aphorisms, take note.

Are MOOCs progressive or regressive?

At the ELESIG's recent symposium on students' experience of MOOCs, one of the interesting questions posed by George Roberts of Oxford Brookes University was whether Open Online Courses (massive or not) would address the digital literacy deficit.

Since we had already agreed amongst ourselves that MOOCs weren't really suited to learners without significant pre-existing digital skills, as well as considerable self-confidence and the ability to drive and organise their own learning, I mischievously proposed that MOOCs would actually widen the digital divide rather than narrowing it: those who had good education already would be able to get more from MOOCs, but those unfortunate enough to have been poorly taught and given no models for self-directed learning would be left even further behind.

It's a feature of open and free systems - such as free markets - that they favour those with the power and resources - the capital - to dominate them. This connection between digital liberalism and political liberalism (that's to say, conservatism) was also made interestingly last week by a commentator on The Guardian's website, following a review of Evgeny Morozov's new book To Save Everything , Click Here. "RO42" wrote:

This sounds a very valuable book, and one that need to be more widely read.

The thing I'm increasingly coming to notice is that technophiles are very, very conservative politically but think they're liberal. They believe in deregulation and hands-off governance because it is "freer", market self-regulation rather than legal frameworks for business operation because it "promotes entrepreneurism" (shades, of course, of "wealth creators") and a strange kind of philanthropic Big Society obsession where everything is "democratically" chosen and the enthusiastic amateur rather than expertise listened to.

There is a massive fear of expertise and knowledge in this new technological culture; anyone who claims to know things is lumped in with the charlatans, or even worse deemed elitist and irrelevant. There is a place for crowd-sourcing and co-operation but it should not come with the devaluing of education.

If free and open education is not just to favour the already-privileged, there need to be educational structures to protect the vulnerable and disadvantaged - which is why I hope there will always be a place for institutions such as my own, The Open University, which have a mission to do precisely that, and why even as we ourselves move into MOOCs I think ours will be rather different from those envisaged by techno-utopians.

Reference

The sessions led by Alison Littlejohn and George Roberts at the ELESIG symposium "Researching Learners' Experiences of MOOCs and other New Pedagogies" can be seen at http://elesig.ning.com/video (you need to register, free, for access to the site).

How to be patronising

Claire Warwick, of the Guardian Higher Education Network, has imagined a lovely piece of spoof guidance to academics, on how to give a talk.

Walk into the room – do make sure that you open the door first, or you might get a nasty bang on the nose! You might notice there are people sitting in seats in front of you. Don't be scared. They are called the audience, and they are there to listen to you. They might ask questions afterwards. You will need to think carefully about your answers: you wouldn't want to say anything silly!

Would anybody ever write anything so crass? Perhaps not. But her point was that much of the guidance to academics on how to use Twitter is just as patronising and inappropriate. And immediately after reading this article, I was looking for something helpful on work-related stress and found that the best that one major employee-assistance company could offer was "Quick fixes" (their own title) such as the following:

Don’t bottle it up
Talking to people is a good way to beat stress because it helps us see the problem more clearly – it may not be as bad as we thought, and other people may have different perspectives and solutions we hadn’t considered.

Worries? What worries?
Worrying about the ‘what ifs?’ in a situation takes a lot of time and energy, and anxiety can quickly escalate. First, find out the facts about a situation – your worries may turn out to be unfounded. If you’re still concerned, plan your strategy, with a friend if necessary, so that you feel more in control of the situation.

Take time out
Ring-fence time in your day to unwind and reflect – it will help you recharge your batteries and get things into perspective.

The problem with these suggestions isn't that they're wrong, but that anyone who has got to the point of needing help with work-related stress will almost certainly have thought of them already and tried them and still be in trouble. (One of the awful things about high-level stress being that it reduces one's ability to deal practically with the things that are causing it.) What these suggestions imply that the reader is too stupid to have thought of them for themselves. If I were suffering from stress and someone were to talk like that to me, I think I'd probably hit them - which, though very bad of course, might actually be more effective than any of these ideas in relieving my stress.

What makes these efforts to be helpful so patronising, wrong and offensive ? They tell you things that you already know (or think you know), and by making a big deal about them as though they're a great secret or revelation, they position you, the reader, as ignorant and stupid. They don't address the mistakes which you might actually be making, or tell you things you actually want to know; when it comes to areas that are difficult (responding to audience questions, dealing with weak management) they avoid them or fudge the issue completely.

How often do we do the same with the guidance we provide for students, I wonder? When they reach out to us asking for our help, all too often we ignore their actual needs (or remain ignorant of them) and just provide them with information which they most likely have already. But at least we don't usually finish, like call centre operators do, by asking - after they've completely failed to solve your problem - "Is there anything else I can help you with?"

The instructions for playing Pong

Pong - the first massively successful video game - has just turned 40 years old. The original Pong machines were placed in bars and pubs, like pinball machines or fruit machines, but they attracted whole new groups of users who were not already players of slot machine games. Which raises the question: given that the technology and the type of game were wholly new to most of those who played it and loved it, how did they learn to play Pong?

From the kind of guidance we produce for students learning to use our online learning systems, you might think that there would have had to be some pretty long and detailed instructions. A lot of things would have been unfamiliar and would have needed to be explained: the rules of the game, how to use the control knobs to move your bat up and down the screen, what happens when the ball hits your bat, what happens when the ball goes out of play, how score is kept, and so on.

You might think that, but you'd be wrong.  The instructions for playing Pong, printed on the machine cabinets, read as follows:

Avoid missing ball for high score.

That's it; there was nothing else. Or rather there was a whole lot else: the physical features of the machine and the experience of experimenting with the game. The coin slot was a familiar affordance for the insertion of a coin, which started the game. The knobs were obvious controls, and nudging them visibly moved the paddles on the screen. The contact between the ball and a paddle was marked as a significant event by the distinctive "pong" sound, and one or the other of the numbers at the top of the screen could be seen to increase whenever the ball went off a left or right edge, which was also accompanied by a negative sound. The one thing which the games designers judged needed explaining was the object of the game: to get a high score by avoiding missing (not, interestingly, "hitting") the ball. The single instruction also, as a bonus, identified the dot on the screen as a representation of a ball, which together with the game's name printed on the machine casing ("pong" does not carry its unfortunate British meaning in the USA, and to its first American users would have suggested only "ping pong"), provided further clues to interpretation from the real-world.

I'm not suggesting that instructions for students using online learning systems should be as brief as the original instructions for Pong, but I do challenge our tendency to strive for thoroughness and explicitness. Consider the advantages of brevity: first, students are more likely to read it; and second, by actually requiring students to fill in the gaps for themselves, they have to think about what they're reading and activate their previous knowledge in order to interpret it - in other words, the learning is deeper and more likely to be retained. Of course, not every single student will be able to manage with brief instructions - there may be some key piece of background knowledge which they lack, or  some distraction may lead them to a wrong interpretation; but most will, and will benefit from the brevity, and for those who need it we can also provide longer, more detailed guidance which holds their hand while walking them through stage by stage. (And those who need to refer to the detailed guidance will probably not need all of it.)

I adopted this approach a couple of years ago, when revising the guidance for new users of the Elluminate Live! audiographic conferencing system. The full Walkthrough ran for 15 pages, and included screenshots to show what should be happening at every stage of installation and setup, but I also produced a 2 page Short Guide, without screenshots, for those users who were used to installing new software and adjusting settings, and needed only a few essential details. Earlier this year, I was pleased to see the new edition of the Open University Computing Guide adopting the same strategy: prefacing its information on each feature of the Virtual Learning Environment with a Quickstart  page for those who neither want nor need the full detail.

Not always, but most of the time, less is more.

Reference

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (MIT Press, 2004), p. xiii

Killing with kindness

Last night I watched The Best of Men: a beautifully-made BBC drama about Dr Ludwig Guttman who transformed the care of patients with spinal injuries at Stoke Manderville Hospital and invented the Paralympic Games as part of his rehabilitation programme. One of the things that was made very clear was that the nursing staff whose methods he challenged and overturned were not uncaring or unkind: they immobilised and sedated patients up to the eye-balls because they could see that they were in pain. It was in fact kindness that motivated them, and they initially resisted Guttman's methods because they seemed unkind: he reduced the patients' medication, forced them to move, and woke them up every two hours at night in order to turn them so that they didn't get bedsores.

And then this morning I read the OU production department's super new style guide for writing student guidance material on using our online systems. Many of the problems it identifies with how guidance is too often written are not the products of thoughtlessness or incompetence: they're the products of kindness, of trying to help students, of trying to explain everything to them.

For example: consider a piece of guidance entitled "Using your module website". Its introduction reads: "This document offers a guide to using your module website while studying with the OU." How could this introduction be improved? By being totally deleted. It adds nothing to what's already in the title. Yet kindness motivates people to write such introductions, knowing the trouble which some students have finding their way around the OU websites and concerned that students need to have the purpose of the document explained to them.

The same kind impulse leads to verbosity and unnecessary complexity. For example: "If you are looking for information on forums, the document is called ‘Forum guidance’ and is available in the Computing Guide. The direct URL is http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=252916". Here's what the style guide recommends as an improvement: "For information on forums, see ‘Forum guidance [link]’ in the Computing Guide."

For those accustomed to lengthy reading times and print documents, this style may seem clipped and abrupt, or perhaps even rude. (The style guide actually recommends avoiding using the word "please".) But useless and unnecessary words have a greater cost online: they fill up the screen, making it harder to see the things that are necessary and important, forcing the reader to expend cognitive load on working out where to devote their attention.

I believe that the best way to be kind and considerate to an online user is to respect the value of their time and come to the point quickly, which is why I think this new style guide is great. But I can imagine it attracting criticism in just the way that Guttman did, and for very much the same reasons. Hopefully it will be vindicated, as he was!

Being known, as a condition for learning

One of the few good things about being ill over a bank holiday weekend is that it gives you a chance to catch up with those videos you've been meaning to watch for ages - in my case, a documentary called "We Are the People We've Been Waiting For", distributed with The Guardian a couple of years ago. The film is a call for transformation in the educational system, to give the next generation the creative and human qualities (and not just the employability skills) they will need for the road ahead. The case is well-made and engagingly stated, though I don't think there's anything in it which would be new or surprising to anyone working in the field.

Except perhaps one thing. The film featured an American school called MetWest High where they have a zero per cent drop-out rate and a 96% graduation rate, which Eve Gordon the Principal explained by the three conditions for learning which they aimed to fulfil. When she started her list, the very first item surprised me completely and had me scrabbling for a notepad.

What would be your top three conditions for learning, those circumstances in which people learn best? My guess is that most learning theorists would include the second on Gordon's list:

"People learn best when they are intrinsically motivated, when they are learning about something that they chose, that they are excited about, that they have real questions about."

The third of her conditions for learning might not occur quite so readily to people in higher education:

"People learn best when they do mind and hand learning together."

Manual operations of course tend to be ignored or disparaged in universities, as though the only learning processes of relevance to their curriculum are purely intellectual.  We acknowledge the importance of "active learning", but we tend to conceive this only in terms of mental activity. Perhaps we should be more explicit about the importance of physical action even in academic learning: the physicality of writing actual notes and actual answers, the embodiment of knowledge and understanding in physical artefacts, the physical transfer of resources from one location or context to another. I found myself thinking that we still have much to learn from school education.

But it was Eve Gordon's very first condition for learning which was the surprise for me.

"People learn best when they are known well, in the context of a relationship."

Now the importance of relationship is  I believe seriously under-acknowledged by theorists. My experience is that if you try to talk about it, people think that you're talking about learning communities or social learning: about peer relationships between learners, not what Gordon is talking about here, which is the fundamental relationship between learner and teacher. Ken Robinson described it like this, elsewhere in the film: " The kids who are not doing well suddenly find themselves in a programme with a teacher, somebody who looks into their eyes and sees who they really are, gives them a different way of doing [things], and they come back to life."

Practitioners have long acknowledged the importance of knowing your learners (in the sense of connaître, acquaintance, rather than savoir, cognition) and of giving them a sense of being known. It's why at the Open University we have from our foundation put much more effort and investment into tutorial support than other distance learning providers; when students come to us short on self-confidence or familiarity with high-level study, the sense of there being someone else who believes in them may make all the difference between their being able to marshal the resources to continue and giving up the unequal struggle. In our learning materials, where the relationship with our students is mediated through text, we always address the student in the second person, as "You", adopting the voice of what Derek Rowntree called "a tutorial in print" - and when we get it right, as I have found in my research, students do indeed feel that there is a teacher who knows and understands them, and with whom they develop a relationship of trust.

I wish there was better theoretical understanding of how this works: what's happening in the learner when they have this sense of being known, of there being someone who believes in them, who will hold the promise, the future for them, and how it is that this can affect their learning so profoundly. What is it that the teacher reaches in and touches, that brings about this transformation? If somebody understands this, I wish that they would tell me.

Reference: Derek Rowntree, Preparing Materials for Open, Distance and Flexible Learning: An Action Guide for Teachers and Trainers (Kogan Page, 1994), p 14.

Audio (and video) feedback on written assignments (3)

Russell Stannard - confusingly, not the Open University emeritus professor of physics, but the University of Westminster lecturer in multimedia and ICT of the same name - has been having great success it seems with audio-visual screen recordings (using Camtasia) of his feedback on students' written work. It seems it enables him to be much more detailed in his comments, combining the benefits of audio feedback with the ability to point to precisely the parts of the students' work he's talking about (the example mentioned is correcting the grammar of Chinese students).
See this article in The Independent, and his own write-up of the work.

Audio feedback on written assignments (2)

Since my previous post on this subject, there's been a lot of talk about audio feedback at Alt-C (the Association of Learning Technology Conference): at least two papers on it and mentions in many more.

Much of the talk has been wildly enthusiastic, but as Isobel Falconer observed to me, most of the examples presented of good audio feedback were just examples of good feedback pure and simple, which would have been good even if they were given in print. People found it hard to distinguish the benefits which were due to the audio medium and the benefits which were simply due to giving better feedback. For example, in one workshop, we were invited to compare a piece of written feedback which was impersonal, brief and bueaucratic, written to a form template, with a piece of audio feedback which was warm and personal, supportive and encouraging, with suggestions for how to improve. Not exactly comparing like with like.

The Open University since its foundation has made it its business to provide its students with personal, supportive and extended feedback; in fact, it is is this, rather than its TV programmes or even its printed course materials to which its success is chiefly attributable. So what WE want to know is whether there is anything additional which the audio medium adds.

From the sessions I attended - together with the much more sophisticated research paper also presented at Alt-C by Sue Rodway-Dyer et al - here are some of the potential advantages.
It may make it easier for tutors to give better feedback, for example:

• they are less likely to slip into academic language
• it may be easier for non-native speakers of English, the medium being more tolerant of verbal idiosyncracies
• by making their feedback more of an object, from which they can stand back and experience it as students will, it prompts tutors to be more critical.

It may be easier for students to make good use of feedback, for example:

• they may find it easier to take in, if their literacy is poor
• it forces them to pay attention, because it can't be skimmed over the way written feedback can (we know this is a problem) - in fact, students apparently often listen to audio feedback two or three times and sometimes make notes
• BUT where their assignments are long and discursive, it can be harder for them to locate the particular places being referred to in the feedback.

Some lecturers are reporting that audio feedback has encouraged dialogue between students and tutors, and between students themselves. Others have reported additional benefits if students themselves start to submit assignments in audio form also - for example, health studies students started to become more critical of how they related to their clients.

Having just heard Mike Wesch's keynote address on how media are not just tools but mediate relationships, it occured to me that this may be a case where a change in medium opens the possibility, at least of a change to the relationship: making it more personal, more aware, and more critical.