Research

In this session, Julian Hopkins will discuss staff and student perspectives on video feedback, Michael Toomey will present on feedback optionality and radical student choice in smaller classes, and Anna Dekalchuk will speak about implementing standardised feedback across institutions.

 

Julian Hopkins: More Personal, Less Practical? Staff and Student Perspectives on Video Feedback
Increasingly large classes and expectations of improved feedback are providing challenges in higher education. Audio and video feedback can be perceived as providing more social communication cues, and research suggest that students tend to prefer it (Espasa et al. 2022, Sarcona et al. 2020). This is also reflected by Penn and Brown (2022), who however also argue that more research is needed to investigate this.
This study explores the use of video feedback to enhance the feedback experience for both students and staff in a large taught Masters course. In a cohort of 361 students submitting recorded poster presentations, 62 supervisors provided feedback, supported by detailed guides. Post-assessment surveys captured their experiences.
Response rates were 11.9% for students, and 58.1% for graders. No significant technical barriers were encountered. Overall, students were satisfied with the video feedback, preferring it to previous experiences of written feedback and finding it more helpful and personal. The use of webcam or screen sharing did not significantly affect student perceptions. Staff, however, mostly did not prefer video feedback for future use, finding it more time-consuming and expressing privacy concerns.
The findings suggest that while video feedback offers pedagogical benefits, especially in fostering empathy and engagement, its broader adoption requires institutional support and workflow redesign to address staff concerns.

 

Anna Dekalchuk: Harmonising marking and feedback across seven universities: Lessons from an international PGT dissertation process

How do we ensure fairness, consistency, and pedagogical integrity when a single PGT dissertation is marked and commented on by academics from three different universities—each working within distinct national regulations, assessment traditions, and feedback cultures? This talk explores that challenge as experienced within a consortium of seven degree‑awarding institutions across Europe and Eurasia. Using the dissertation process as the most visible locus of this complexity, I will discuss how our programme navigates divergent expectations around who can review work, how feedback is formulated, and how dissertations are evaluated across different academic systems. I will highlight the mechanisms we have developed—mutual recognition arrangements, shared assessment regulations, a common rubric and conversion matrix, ongoing refinement of the marking‑sheet format, and annual cross‑institutional training—to reconcile these differences and support transparent, robust, and student‑centred assessment practices.
 

Michael Toomey: Feedback optionality, radical choice, and student-centred pedagogy

“Student-centred teaching” is widely accepted as an important approach to teaching students at the university level. However, in reality, it is very often the case that what is described as student-centred teaching is at best teacher-centred with student-centred trappings. Generally speaking, lecturers set the curriculum for the courses they teach; they set the reading list and the means of assessment; and they oftentimes dictate how feedback is provided. In each of these cases, students are reduced to the role of being passive subjects in their own learning, rather than agents. The issue of feedback provision highlights this contradiction; while SPS courses are frequently praised by external examiners and by third-party peer assessors for the quality, clarity, and depth of feedback provided to students, NSS Scores persistently reflect significant student dissatisfaction with feedback quality and usefulness, and the extent to which their voices are heard. With this in mind, I describe an experimental approach to feedback provision I am trialling this year in an Honours course, one which is focused on optionality and which seeks to genuinely centre the preferences and needs of the student.

 
 

 

Wednesday, March 11
2pm-3:30pm
James Watt 361 LT 

Led by Dr. Gorana Misic

First published: 13 February 2026

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