The Digital Education Studio caught up with Dominic Hurst, Academic Lead for Assessment at the Institute of Dentistry, to learn about his innovative approach to automating personalised feedback.
In the screencast below Dominic demonstrates and explains his approach.
In our interview (below) Dominic shares what inspired the method, the challenges students were facing around feedback, and how he designed a time-efficient solution using Excel and mail merge. He reflects on the impact it’s had—particularly for students needing to resit assessments—and offers practical tips for educators looking to adopt a similar approach in their own teaching.
What prompted you to create this new approach to feedback?
That was inspired by a colleague (sadly I have forgotten their name) who shared the approach at an e-learning event perhaps 10 years ago. Students should always get feedback, but I had been exploring how to do this in a way that involved minimal time, and this was it.
What challenges were students facing with feedback before this change?
They were not getting any. I still don’t think students get sufficient feedback for their summative assessments. How do we expect them to learn from these? Students ask me the same question.
How did you go about designing and developing this feedback method?
I have been using this approach for several years for one of our first-year assignments to provide feedback on how well students had developed medical database search strategies. The concept is simple: for each mark, I assign a statement. Using straight forward Excel formulae, I can then automatically replace the mark with the comment and use mail merge to put it into an email to students.
What kind of response have you had from students so far?
Positive. Particularly for those who have failed an assessment and need to retake it.
How might other educators adopt or adapt this approach in their own teaching?
When they write their questions, as well as writing their model answers, they can write some developmental feedback to go into a template for each mark. I purposefully do not say what the answer is. I just tell them the area that they need to work on to improve, if they need to.
What’s next – are you planning any refinements based on what you’ve learned so far?
I am trying to share the practice to encourage colleagues to adopt something similar so that we are serving our students better by providing them with specific feedback.