British Universities Film & Video Council

moving image and sound, knowledge and access

The Paperless Department

ALAbout the author: Anna Levick, Head of Media, New College, Pontefract, explains how the employment of Audio Visual technology to construct student essays and teacher feedback has helped them embrace a digital pedagogy.
E-mail: anna.levick@ncpontefract.ac.uk

The employment of Audio Visual technology to construct student essays and teacher feedback

Creative Media is a subject that should be evolving constantly so that it is contemporary and embraces the opportunities that technology may offer. And yet all too often Media is being experienced and taught as a subject that is firmly rooted in the traditional formats of analytical essays and written examinations. This results in a subject that is considered theoretical, unappealing and does not challenge the student to fully engage. Therefore an initiative was launched to take the Media Department of New College, Pontefract away from the more traditional approach and embrace a digital pedagogy.

The students identified that would initially benefit from this initiative were those studying Btec Certificate and Subsidiary Diploma in Creative Media, with the intention that this would ultimately be used by all media students and within the wider college. The students, aged sixteen to nineteen, have a below average GCSE point score of 4.1 – 5, and exhibit many of the traits of under achievement and lack of aspiration as outlined in the AoC report on underachievement (Underachievement in Education of White Working Class Children Association of Colleges & the Sixth Form Colleges’ Association, September 2013). Indeed many of the students are disaffected with education and are hard to motivate. It was hoped that the initiative would improve not only the students’ grades and experience of education but also employability skills and life choices.

The initial stage occurred in 2011 when we transferred all paper resources to the VLE, Moodle, and encouraged students to use the forum spaces as a form of collaborative learning. The department noticed that the students had a greater engagement with the subject material through the creation of this digital and collaborative learning community, creating what we hoped would be ‘a learning environment in which students develop self-regulation and error detection skills’ (John Hattie & Helen Timperley, The Power of Feedback, 2007)

However the forum space still required all members of that community to interact in a written format. While allowances were made so that an appropriate level of informality was acceptable, the restrictions of having to write our conversations became apparent. This was then replicated in written responses to a variety of media texts with mechanical English often hindering the students’ ability to communicate and shifting the teachers’ attention from content to grammar.

To combat this gap between student knowledge and their ability to communicate it, in 2012 it was decided that students would not be submitting research and analytical pieces in written format but rather they would construct audiovisual essays. Students are expected to construct two essays that are rigorous in content and be well constructed using appropriate images, archive footage, text on screen and non-diegetic sound such as music and narration.

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