Using Adobe Acrobat to Enhance Immediacy and Instructor Feedback
Summary: At the end of this presentation, attendees will have learned to use the advanced features available in Adobe Acrobat to provide audio and visual feedback on electronically submitted student work. Attendees will also be exposed to some of the benefits of instructor immediacy and audio feedback in distance courses.
Description:
This spring will be the fourth semester I have taught a distance education course for Purdue University, and during each of these semesters, I found that the majority of the time spent teaching my online course was used providing feedback for my students. Last semester, I began experimenting with a new method of providing feedback: audio annotation.
Using the advanced features of Adobe Acrobat, I have found audio annotation to be particularly effective at both reducing the time it takes to provide student feedback, and increasing the quality and quantity of the feedback.
Students reported feeling more connected to the course when feedback was provided via audio, and anecdotally, they seemed to pay more attention to the feedback delivered via audio than when it was delivered solely via text. A preliminary investigation of the literature surrounding audio feedback in distance education has supported these observations.
This next semester, I plan to expand my use of audio feedback for students using Adobe Acrobat, which provides an easy to use platform for recording and delivering contextually relevant audio feedback for electronically submitted documents.
Using the advanced features of Adobe Acrobat, I have found audio annotation to be particularly effective at both reducing the time it takes to provide student feedback, and increasing the quality and quantity of the feedback.
Students reported feeling more connected to the course when feedback was provided via audio, and anecdotally, they seemed to pay more attention to the feedback delivered via audio than when it was delivered solely via text. A preliminary investigation of the literature surrounding audio feedback in distance education has supported these observations.
This next semester, I plan to expand my use of audio feedback for students using Adobe Acrobat, which provides an easy to use platform for recording and delivering contextually relevant audio feedback for electronically submitted documents.
Robert Yale
Graduate Assistant
Purdue University
Graduate Assistant
Purdue University
Robert Yale is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at Purdue University. He teaches both online and offline undergraduate courses in Communication.