In addition to my usual classroom use of exemplars as a means of familiarising students with the assessment requirements of a specific module, this year I have created a video walk through of an exemplar. Initially this was to enable those who missed the relevant class to catch up on the session, but the approach was welcomed by students who attended the exemplars activity session, as well as those who did not. 

How to create a digital exemplar walk through: 

• Bring up the exemplar on screen after selecting a ‘good’ piece of work

• Read through and use comments in word to annotate the work with points which would be surfaced in feedback, particularly comments related to the assessment criteria (of course!). Comments include things done well, things done less well which could be avoided and opportunities for further detail and development. This tagging process acts only as an aide memoire so that as I create  feedback video I am aware of what I wanted to include. 

• Open Screencast-o-Matic to very easily screen record the work as a video as I re-read it through and talk to each of the tags. ‘This work includes this … which is useful because…’ ‘this work used literature in this way …. It might be better to …. Because ….’. None of this is rehearsed; that would be too time consuming. The resultant video is a commentary on performance.

• The video is uploaded and made available to students.

After using the resource there was some consensus amongst my students that the value was ONLY in listening to the assessment commentary and not specifically in looking at the work. One student described how they listened but did not watch. They then recorded notes about what they should include, remember and avoid. They avoided looking at the work for fear of having their own ideas reshaped. If assessment judgments are ‘socially situated interpretive act[s]’ then the digitised marking commentary may be a useful way of making that process more transparent for students, and indeed for other staff.

I will definitely be including this in future modules.

Handley, K., den Outer, B. & Price, B. (2013) Learning to mark: exemplars, dialogue and participation in assessment communities. Higher Education Research & Development Vol. 32 , Iss. 6.