There are many different ways of providing university students with
feedback on their assessment performance. These methods include comments
which are frequently handwritten to individual verbal feedback or even
recorded audio feedback. Providing meaningful and constructive formative
and/or terminal feedback in a timely fashion is a challenge faced by
all educators (Biggam, 2010). As students are taking more responsibility
for their learning and becoming more independent learners they are
becoming more demanding regarding feedback (Blair, and McGinty 2012).
Many students complain that the feedback they receive is inconsistent
(particularly when a module is taught by many different faculty
members). Some complain that illegible handwriting makes it difficult to
read their feedback. The biggest challenge that faculty members face is
that thoughtful meaningful written comments require a lot of time
(Gross et al, 2013). This paper discusses a project that explored using a
free open source solution (Auto Multiple choice) to return constructive
feedback to students in a much more efficient manner. This method of
automated assessment feedback was used by faculty in Physics at the
University of Limerick to reduce the turnaround time in making comments
available to students. The experience also yielded a number of
unexpected results around student motivation which is also discussed.