EXPLORING THE POSSIBILITIES OF AUTOMATED FEEDBACK FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

There are many different ways of providing university students with feedback on their assessment performance. These methods include comments which are frequently handwritten to individual verbal feedback or even recorded audio feedback. Providing meaningful and constructive formative and/or terminal feedback in a timely fashion is a challenge faced by all educators (Biggam, 2010). As students are taking more responsibility for their learning and becoming more independent learners they are becoming more demanding regarding feedback (Blair, and McGinty 2012). Many students complain that the feedback they receive is inconsistent (particularly when a module is taught by many different faculty members). Some complain that illegible handwriting makes it difficult to read their feedback. The biggest challenge that faculty members face is that thoughtful meaningful written comments require a lot of time (Gross et al, 2013). This paper discusses a project that explored using a free open source solution (Auto Multiple choice) to return constructive feedback to students in a much more efficient manner. This method of automated assessment feedback was used by faculty in Physics at the University of Limerick to reduce the turnaround time in making comments available to students. The experience also yielded a number of unexpected results around student motivation which is also discussed.