Student Audio Notes Project: lessons from autonomous use of MP3 recorders by students to enhance their learning

Ongoing and successful development work around the design and delivery of audio feedback and audio lecture note‐making at Sheffield Hallam University, together with an awareness of how digital audio might be used to empower disabled students, led to the proposal for the Student Audio Notes project. The idea of digital audio‐enhanced learner autonomy had emerged from earlier work by the authors which had suggested that feedback could be more meaningful if the learner takes responsibility for gathering it and feeding it forward into their studies and indeed, later, into their employment. This learner responsibility provided an important focus for The Student Audio Notes Project (SANP): a year‐long investigation into how students might use MP3 recording devices to enrich their own experiences of learning. SANP gave out MP3 recorders to participating students and aimed to encourage and challenge these students to explore how the devices could be used so that good practice might emerge and be shared. It was hoped that they would identify and record any encounters involving verbalised communication that they felt helpful in deepening and reflecting upon their learning. In this way the act of audio recording would ideally become an essential, ever‐present, autonomous learning habit for them. A strand of this investigation sought to find out, in particular, whether the recording of digital audio by disabled students could bring benefits to disabled learners. As the study by Healey et al. (2006) showed, 51% of disabled students (n=276) responded well to tutor support aimed at improving the standard of their academic work, as opposed to the 43% of non‐disabled students (n=272). It was expected, therefore, that student’s use of audio note‐making would result in similar beneficial impacts. When note‐making systems are used effectively, as previous research by Intons‐Peterson and Fournier (1986) has also shown, note‐making can increase memory encoding in the learner and so enhance their ability to recall the information later. Therefore, it was hoped that SANP would show how audio note‐making could be effective in empowering students with disabilities. Findings from SANP demonstrate that all participating students discovered benefits from using recording devices and that they found it useful to capture a range of formal, semi‐ formal and informal situations. These findings raise questions for further research and support and some recommendations are made to ensure such activity is properly undertaken and supported