Enhancing social presence and online assessment with audio/video

Dr Melinda Waterman | Science, Medicine and Health (SMAH)

I utilised the built-in Moodle functionality to record video for improving social presence in my Moodle sites and as an alternative to oral examination-style questions in online quiz assessment tasks.

After learning about the Poodll Moodle plug-in in the LTC ‘Teaching in Online Modes’ program, the teaching team and I discovered its versatility not only for improving social presence by embedding video and audio files into the BIOL104 (Evolution, Biodiversity and Environment, 168 students), BIOL105 (Functional Biology of Animals and Plants, 199 students) and BIOL362 (Ecophysiology, 72 students) Moodle sites. This included changing the way we could make online announcements, break up the text and introduce activities within books, and as an alternative to oral examination-style questions in the Mid-Session and Final quiz assessment tasks.

How?

To reduce the amount of text students were sifting through, we put ourselves in the student’s shoes early in the semester and decided to use Poodll as a way to announce the changes in place for emergency remote learning (video and audio announcements) and to introduce members of the teaching team who students have not met face-to-face with yet.

As part of developing online alternatives to hands-on practicals, we wanted to add some form of social presence to improve student engagement with the practical. Poodll videos were one method we used to break up this content and show students we (lecturers/tutors/practical demonstrators) were also keen to help them learn.

In addition, our written exam assessments were moved online as Moodle quizzes. There were multiple challenges that we faced and at the forefront was the issue of academic integrity. Although none of the quizzes were invigilated, we introduced an oral question into the exam to help gauge student understanding. Poodll videos were an excellent approach for this rather than coordinating individual oral assessments via Webex or Zoom, and allowed students to receive a randomised question to answer during the timed exam. We didn’t realise the power of this tool in an exam setting until after trialling it in the Mid-Session Exam. It certainly was nice to see students’ faces and hear how well they understood particular aspects of the content.

Reflection

In the beginning, I found I would spend much time preparing my 'script' so that I could look into the camera during video recording as much as possible (highly recommended that you look into the camera!) but I became more efficient with practice.

Embedding videos using Poodll is a convenient method to allow students to practice academic integrity and to coordinate randomised oral examination questions for classes. We assured students that their videos will only be viewed by them and the academic and they appreciated this information. Considering that video answers take longer to mark than written answers do, it is probably best used in classes with less than 100 enrolments. In BIOL362, we had a practice quiz space for students to practice recording and posting their videos via Poodll. This practice space also worked as a back-up place for students to post their video answers if they encountered any issues during a timed quiz.