Video enhanced multiple choice questions - personalising eLearning

Instructional videos have been successfully used to teach mathematical concepts to distance students. These videos allow the students to see and hear their lecturer with an added advantage of being able to stop and rewind or replay until the concept is understood. While videos facilitate student understanding, formative assessment provides both lecturer and student with an indication of the latter's mastery of a mathematical concept. Formative assessment with handwritten feedback is viewed as preferential because changing university culture means few academics have the time to provide comprehensive handwritten feedback to large numbers of students for every concept. Further, for this feedback to be useful it needs to be delivered to the student in a timely manner. The ability to provide instant feedback is one of the major advantages of online quizzes using multiple choice questions (MCQs). There are mixed attitudes towards MCQs within academia. For each attribute of MCQs, research can be found to both support and condemn it. Feedback from MCQs is undoubtedly fast but is it effective? Using video enhanced feedback for online quizzes may provide the best of both worlds.