How can e-learning help with student feedback?

I attended a teaching and learning meeting in one of our academic departments recently when someone asked if they could use technology to improve their feedback to students. Four possibilities sprang to mind.

Online marking  – As an associate lecturer at the OU I have to use online feedback via standard forms and document mark-up (i.e. comments in Word) is obligatory. After several years I now have a ‘bank’ (personal collection) of comments I can draw on to quickly provide rich personalised feedback. Moreover the OU uses ‘rubrics’ (marking schemes) to structure feedback and make sure it is aligned to the learning outcomes. This improves the efficiency and effectiveness of marking and honestly I’m not sure I could manage without this approach now. Here in UCL many colleagues use Moodle Assignments to allow markers to bulk upload markers’ annotations on files of student work, and to set up rubrics and other structured marksheets.  GradeMark, part of Turnitin, has a particularly convenient marking environment. Its unique selling point is customisable sets of frequently-made comments which provide online marking with drag and drop and general online comments. Comment ‘banks’ are available at a click and a drag, and can be shared across programmes and they can themselves be linked to rubric structures.

Self-assessment – Perennial favourites in UCL student surveys are diagnostic and self-assessment quizzes, usually developed in Moodle’s Quiz, which despite its frivolous name is actually a very sophisticated assessment and feedback tool. Moodle quizzes offer different question types, including multiple choice, gap fill, and drag-and-drop,  all of which can automate giving feedback, based on the settings tutors choose.  For example, feedback could be given immediately a question is answered, or it can be deferred until after the quiz is completed. Students appreciate the chance to check progress and get focused feedback based on the answer they chose.  While writing good questions and feedback takes thought and care , technically quizzes are comparitively easy to set up in Moodle. The trick is to provide good, differentiated feedback, linking to remedial or additional materials that the student can look at straight away. In Moodle these links could be to documents, items on the electronic reading lists, Lecturecast recordings, YouTube videos and so in as well as simple texts and images. Questions can be imported from Word using a template, allowing rapid quiz authoring without an internet connection, and even the Matlab GUI has been used to automatically generate mathematical question banks for later import. As an alternative UCL has also had some success using PeerWise enabling students to design their own multiple-choice questions (MCQs).

Audio and video feedback – One interesting feature of GradeMark is the facility to provide students audio feedback. Staff at UCL have been experimenting with audio feedback for several years, adding live audio comments to text documents or forum posts, for example. The rationale is that feedback is richer, more personal, more expressive of different emphasis, and there is more of it for the amount of time spent. Since it also tends to be less concerned with particularities of grammar, spelling, etc, some markers may want to combine with word-processed annotations. An extension of this is to make a single recording giving general feedback to an entire cohort on a given piece of work. And an extension of this idea is to create simple narrated screencasts using Lecturecast personal capture (desktop recording) to record worked examples for generic assessment and exam feedback. This approach has been tried in at least one department with positive results.

Peer assessment and MyPortfolio – Technology can of course provide whole new ways to enable group assessment and the development of rich personal portfolios, for example using the increasingly popular UCL portfolio and presentation environment MyPortfolio.  For an excellent introduction, have a look at the recent UCL case study Making history with iPads, peer assessment and MyPortfolio.

Further reading

• JISC (2010) Effective Assessment in a Digital Age includes a PDF version, videos and podcasts related to the case studies and a planning tool
• Ferrell, Gill (2013) Supporting assessment and feedback practice with technology: from tinkering to transformation (PDF)
• JISC (undated) Using Audio Feedback for Assessment
• REAP project web site   Re-engineering Assessment Practices
• JISC Design Studio: Assessment & Feedback resource collection

Image “Got Feedback?” by Alan Levine https://flic.kr/p/nKPbtE