How (and why) to use video assessments in alternative grading

Post from Grading for Growth by Robert Talbot

The word “assessment” means literally “to sit down with”. So when we assess students, it should be like pulling up a chair next to them and having them show us what they know. Videos can be a great way to make assessments feel a little more like this.

Excerpt:

Why do video assessment?

But why bother with video, when traditional written assessments can do the job and keep students involved in a feedback loop?

I started using student-created video as an assessment medium out of necessity. A few years before I got started with specifications grading, I taught an asynchronous online Calculus class. Students worked online homework problems as part of their grade, but these were graded entirely by the online system. That didn’t seem like a good indication of real understanding, so I looked for a way to give them a chance to add some depth to their answers. Turning in written solutions would have worked, but I thought it would be more interesting to have students record themselves working out their solutions on video instead.

Not only were the video solutions more interesting, they were better than written solutions. The majority of information that we communicate is nonverbal, and when a student makes a video of a calculus problem, the student’s visual presence — body language, hand gestures, handwriting size — tell me at least as much about their true understanding of and engagement with a problem as a written record does. In the end, the work was graded on correctness of the result and the quality of the explanation. Video went a long way towards improving those explanations.

Video solutions added a much-needed human dimension to the asynchronous course because I could finally see what the students looked like and hear what they sounded like. I got permission from students to take successful video solutions and make them available to the class on the LMS, giving the vibe of “presenting work at the board” and giving students the sense that they belong to a class of human beings and are not just a row in a spreadsheet.

How to do video assessment

Use Flipgrid as your video platform. Flipgrid (it recently rebranded as just Flip, but I’ll never not refer to it using its old name) is almost perfectly suited for this kind of work. It’s free to use, dead simple, accessible across all devices and through a browser, and private. And most of all, it’s entirely self-contained — students can go through the entire process of making, posting, and getting feedback on videos just using the Flipgrid app or website. Here is the Educator Toolkit if you have never used it before. A few years ago Flipgrid was acquired by Microsoft, so it integrates very well with Office and other Microsoft tools.
The only requirements for videos, other than correctness and quality of the explanation, are that the video has to be under 5 minutes in length (practice until it’s short!), the video and audio have to be clear, and that it has to be the student doing the presentation. (It’s OK to have a friend help with the filming if needed.) If I can’t tell it’s the student doing the presenting, it needs to be redone. For me, this is sufficient, but you might want to have more stringent requirements for the video. I used to have the requirement that the student’s voice, face, and handwriting must be in frame at all times to prevent cheating. This became too restrictive for students, so I dropped it.

How to grade video assessments

Basically, you can grade video assessments like you grade anything else in an alternatively graded course:

You can not grade them at all, and instead use videos as a source of feedback; and students can use them to justify their self-assignment of a course grade.
Or, you can grade them on a two- to four-level rubric (Satisfactory/Revise, or EMRN, etc.) relative to how well the product matches up to the quality standards that you set for the work. As always, you’ll want to be clear about what you expect. My students get those standards in a specifications document that spells out exactly what a “Successful” video looks like.

If a student submits a video and it’s not “successful”, it’s easy to handle — leave a comment to the student and explain the issues, then ask them to reshoot the video. It’s quite rare in my experience to get a video that needs to be redone, though, and usually it’s for technical reasons, like I couldn’t read their handwriting or the audio was garbled.

Pro tips for using video assessments

Two suggestions for you if you decide to try this yourself:

Limit the number of submissions students can make in a week. This is just good practice for any kind of assessment in an alt-grading course to keep the workload manageable. I limit my students to two videos per week.
Require that students do videos one at a time, finishing their most recently-requested problem before they can request a new one. Otherwise it’s possible for a student to request multiple problems at the same time, turn some (or none) of them in during a given week, while requesting more problems in the meanwhile. I’ve learned the hard way that without a “one at a time” policy it becomes impossible to keep track of who is doing what.