Student video projects in post-grad Digital Marketing

Origin

School of Management

Contact

• Emma Slade
• Martin Nutbeem (DEO)
• Pete Herbert (DEO)

Guides

DEO student guide to creating videos

Objectives

Assessment is not just a means to determine the achievement of ILOs, but also a valuable learning experience. Digital content creation and editing skills are important tools in the working world of marketing these days, so Emma decided to redesign the assessment on a postgraduate digital marketing unit to give students the ability to develop or hone their existing skills by producing videos.

What was done

Recognizing that this might be a nerve-wracking prospect for students who most of the time are far more familiar with exams, written assignments or face-to-face presentations as assessment formats, she put a number of things in place to help them overcome their fears and encourage their enthusiasm.

One of them was to create a video herself (this was before the digital transition of teaching caused by the pandemic), to talk them through the assignment and gave them some examples of what they could do. This also enabled her to see first hand some of the problems they might encounter so that she could share these learnings with her students.

The Digital Education Office provided support, including putting a whole section of resources into the Blackboard space for Emma and her students.

Outcomes

Students' creativity went way above Emma's expectations, and, for her, this was one of the best marking experiences she's had.

She ran a short voluntary anonymous survey with the students after they'd submitted their assignments but before receiving their marks. The quantitative data showed students were a bit more anxious undertaking the video assignment than written assignments, but on the whole they were far more satisfied after completing the video assignment compared to written assignments or face-to-face presentations, and really importantly they generally felt strongly that they had been given the opportunity to develop new skills and that these skills would be useful for their future careers. Most of their positive qualitative comments to the open-ended questions relate to the skills they were able to develop and how much they enjoyed doing something different from their usual assignments. One of the students even got in touch after graduating to tell Emma that the assignment had given her a key talking point at graduate job interviews.

Taster of student feedback

• "This assignment made me feel less nervous than face-to-face"
• "[I enjoyed] learning videoing and editing skills and being more confident in front of the camera"
• "I enjoyed the process of editing the video because it's the first time and I got a new skill"
• "[I enjoyed] the animation and creativity"
• "I love it was different to every other assignment"
• "My biggest accomplishment about this assignment is that in addition to consolidating my knowledge of digital marketing, I also learned some basic editing skills"

Key takeaways and considerations

• Student produced videos are different from the usual assignment formats students are given, offering them an opportunity to get creative.
• They really help students develop and hone their digital skills and they are less geographically and temporally bound.
• Producing a video is much more work for a student than a face-to-face presentation so it needs to be recognised in the assessment weighting. You also need to carefully consider the practicalities of such an assignment as a group-based task when students are spatially separated.
• We can't just take for granted that every student has a device they can record or edit videos on, nor that they know how to do so, so how are you going to find out who needs what support and how will you provide that?
• When redesigning assessment, consider the authenticity of the assessment format and don't just replace for example a face-to-face format with producing a video without careful thought of all the options.