Reflections on using digital audio to give assessment feedback

This paper aims to share the experiences of a group of geography department staff at the University of Portsmouth who have experimented with digital audio assessment feedback. In particular, the paper aims to indicate what it was like to do it, whether it was cost-benefit effective and whether the method was able to deliver superior feedback vis a vis traditional written feedback methods. There is some literature on the benefits of audio feedback, but most of this focuses on the student experience/ perspective. This article, after providing some justification for adopting the audio method, considers its advantages from the perspective of the teacher and begins to address the ways in which the audio method might most effectively be used.