By offering personalised feedback for students, edtech services such as GoReact are making online education delivery less remote
After a full calendar year of Covid-19 restrictions, during which universities migrated on the fly to online teaching platforms, there is a consensus that the pandemic has accelerated existing trends towards blended modes of learning. The changes we see on and off campus are evidence of the higher education sector committing to digital transformation. But where does that leave assessment?
Gathering under the rubric “Accelerate and humanise skills-based learning with video feedback and assessment”, a webinar hosted by Times Higher Education in partnership with GoReact – a video-based assessment and feedback software provider – brought together industry leaders from a variety of disciplines to explore the impact that video-based assessment has had on teaching.
Josh Beutler, GoReact’s vice-president of business development, opened the session with some observations about how the teaching environment has changed in recent years and where a product such as GoReact fits in. Beutler said video-based modes of assessment and feedback enhanced skills-based learning, with the software slotting seamlessly into extant learning management systems.
GoReact is used by 650 colleges and universities worldwide, 65 per cent of which use the software within their own learning management systems. By moving assessment to a video platform, educators can offer time-stamped feedback and reply in-video, affording students deeper insights into their performance. “There is no more personalised learning experience than the learner seeing themselves on video and getting great feedback, in perfect context, so that they can move forward and they can learn faster,” said Beutler.
Video-based assessment can be applied to all manner of disciplines. Attending the webinar were representatives from healthcare, business, translation studies and linguistics, all of whom had used GoReact as part of their online teaching strategies.
Dara Murray, assistant professor of nursing at the University of West Alabama, said GoReact made assessing nursing students easier by allowing educators to validate a student’s psychomotor skills before they enter a clinical setting.
Being able to time-stamp feedback is an invaluable asset when training nurses to catheterise a patient. “When you are evaluating a skill in-person, face-to-face, you don’t interrupt the student when they make a mistake,” said Murray. “You let them finish, then try to go back and talk about it after the fact. To be able to pause that video at the [exact] time, most of the time the students see it themselves. They see that mistake.”
Video-based assessment and feedback created “more teachable moments”, said Dot Powell, director of teaching and learning enhancement at Warwick Business School. “When [students] received a comment from a tutor, they too could react and offer feedback,” she said. “In a sense, that opened a dialogue with the tutor around skills-based demonstration. It was evidence of learning.”
At the University of Alabama, GoReact is also being used to set assignments, with pharmacology students tasked with creating video advertisements for drugs. Students can post their adverts in GoReact, collaborate with colleagues and receive feedback, making for a more interactive learning experience.
For linguistics courses, video assessment had become a key component of teaching long before Covid-19 shuttered campuses. Stockholm University has been using GoReact since 2013. Joel Bäckström, a lecturer in the department of linguistics, said it was particularly useful for users of sign language.
While all in attendance welcomed the efficiencies offered by video assessment, they said it was the positive impact on the student experience that was most valuable to those who used it. Dijana Tockner Glova, senior lecturer in the department for translation studies at the University of Vienna, observed an uptick in students’ performances when they were assessed on video.
Find out more about GoReact.
Watch the Times Higher Education and GoReact webinar on-demand above or on the THE Connect YouTube channel.
