Benefits to the students

So for example for the students they get continuous feedback on their work and that is particularly important in a module where for example students typically will submit a single essay towards the end of a module and they won’t know how they are doing till the very end.

So in this case throughout the module they are getting feedback.

In our department these Nathan Bodington (VLE) contributions are often… one of their appeals is as an alternative to oral presentations.

Now for the students many of them find the oral presentation very stressful and a lot of students when a seminar starts with two or three presentations as you will get in a group of 15.

They will consider the time spent listening to other students’ presentations as time wasted. In this case really everybody is giving a presentation and that presentation is given before the class starts, so you can launch straight into the discussion. So there is no, in that sense, time wasted with student presentations.

Perhaps the biggest advantage for the students though is that it forces them to be prepared in advance of the tutorial so students already have formed ideas that they want to bring to the tutorial.

They can see the quality of one another’s ideas and particularly for the shy students, for the ones who are inclined to devalue their own contributions. They can see the quality of their ideas as compared to the ideas of their peers.

In turn when students get feedback at the beginning of