Providing Feedback
Feedback is essential to learning. It lets people know whether they are mastering the outcomes and indicates whether or not remedial or additional action is required. Feedback can also encourage learners to stretch and reach new heights. Feedback is like water or air for online learners; they need it to survive.
Feedback can be inspiring to learners. It can assist struggling learners who need more encouragement and positive reinforcement. It can also help learners better appreciate the specific strategies they need to use to improve their skill level or performance. Nevertheless, if not done with sensitivity, respect, and empathy, feedback can also be devastating. Poorly planned, or awkwardly phrased feedback can confuse and demoralize a learner.
To be effective, feedback should be positive, concrete, and specific. Feedback should also be instructive. Like asking good questions, providing feedback also enables participants to reflect on their learning and determine possible follow-up actions and strategies.
Make it clear, relevant, useful
Clear
- Where relevant, tie your feedback to learning outcomes, rubrics, and criteria
- Set deadlines strategically – consider the pacing of the learning activities as well as your own availability for providing feedback
- Communicate when students can expect to receive feedback, and how you are going to deliver it. Be timely – respond to questions and return assessments as soon as is reasonable
- Specify what you are giving feedback on and how students can use it
- Make feedback more frequent and in alignment with chunks of learning, giving students a chance to reflect on it.
- Make it timely, returned shortly after assessment.
- Consider feeding back on more than product: processes students undertook, interactions with peers, attitudes and engagement (from drafts, notes from submitted work, synchronous sessions, reflections)
- Make sure feedback is part of a process with clear connection to ‘what next?’ and discussions you have with your student.
- Use feedback to set goals (by you or the student)
- Get organized – create a central place for delivering feedback that is easy to manage, navigate and use for all involved.
- Notify students when feedback is available, do not assume they will log in to manually check.
Involve your students
Manage expectations
- Explain your assessment and feedback process.
- Discuss and co-create a feedback process with your students.
- Build reflective activities into the feedback process.
- Demonstrate empathy and caring by being available to help
- Promote self-assessment and critical thinking by asking your students to pick out examples of things they did well or areas for improvement in line with rubrics and criteria.
- Where possible, involve students through peer review.
- Have real-time, just in time conversations with individuals, small groups or the entire class as needed (Use Zoom or a good, old-fashioned phone call to connect with students)
- Plan sessions which support your students’ development of the skills needed to understand and give feedback to others
- Make virtual office hours more productive by asking students to submit questions/topics to discuss prior to the session, giving you time to prepare your responses.
- Rebrand your virtual office hours – suggestions: Happy Hours, Coffee Breaks, Afternoon Tea, Consultations
- Reduce the frequency of virtual office hours (e.g. instead of every week, hold these 4x over the term at strategic points of the course)
- Announce the office hours sessions ahead of time so students can plan to be there
Do more with less
Think beyond text
- Audio or video feedback can be a motivating and personal (but still asynchronous) mode of delivery. (Note: may need a transcript to be fully accessible).
- Record a message and ask students to turn it into an action plan.
- Pull out key takeaways and use it as a group learning activity.
- Build in drafting and redrafting activities.
- Include peer review.
- Be playful with feedback, keep it constructive but use it as a place to experiment – especially formative.
- Create effective rubrics or grading guides in the LMS (Moodle) - downloading, marking, saving and uploading Word files takes more time
- Connect learning activities to the gradebook