Watch yourself! Giving feedback on recorded presentations in a Virtual learning

The development of effective oral communication skills is an important educational goal for future technical engineers. Learning those skills involves instruction in rhetoric, and evaluating actual presentational behaviour. Supplying feedback by looking at video recordings is a path often followed in oral presentation courses: short fragments are shown in class to point out strengths and weaknesses of the presentation of the student. The frag-ments illustrate more concretely the comments that are made by the other observers (peers; teachers). Till re-cently the students got their presentation delivered on VHS-tape. They took the video-registration home with the task to re-evaluate the performance and to formulate specific behavioural goals for their next performance. The contribution of the fellow students was limited. The evaluation papers of the students – after reviewing the VHS-tape – were often rather of a general and defensive nature. The introduction of a virtual learning environment (i.e. BlackBoard) offered new possibilities. A program was developed in which students first learned to evaluate the performances of their peers. Budget was important: the analogue video equipment could not easily be dis-carded. The first impressions show that learning to carefully comment on performances by one’s peers results in a much richer evaluation of the student’s own presentation