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Using Feedback to Increase Interaction

Why?

Students want to know how well they are doing in a course. Although grades are one measure, many students see them as abstract. Direct and specific feedback helps students correct errors and opens conversation about how and why.
We have found that students appreciate feedback and often comment about how helpful feedback is to understanding.
Feedback shows concern for the students' learning and passes on the standards and expectations of the instructor.
It is important for students to know that you care about the quality of student work in the course.
Everytime you provide feedback, you are communicating your expectations for student work in the course.
Feedback can be a very positive experience for the student and provide a great deal of encouragement to continue to refine skills.
Feedback is a great way to provide corrective advice and reinforce desired skills at the same time.
Thinking about the types of feedback you will provide in a course (individual, small group, and large group) can help you establish routines in a course.

Implications for Teaching and Learning.

Feedback can be used to teach.
Feedback can be used to reduce routine questions. Acknowledgement feedback tells students you received the assignment or the test, reducing questions like, "Did you get my assignment?"
Feedback clearly communicates your expectations for quality.
Providing direct and meaningful feedback is difficult and takes an enormous amount of time.

Promising Practices for TWU.

Create a feedback plan to make it easier to track feedback and to make sure you provide feedback to all students. We suggest you list all students and then create columns for individual and small group feedback.
If you use small group activities, we suggest you use the Groups feature to create groups and then use this tool to communicate with the group members. One way to do this is to have the students turn in the assignment and then provide general feedback to all students in the group through the email feature in Groups. You can also use the comments feature found in the Assignments tool to do the same thing.
Norm students to use the discussion board for common questions. Your goal is to respond once to the question and then norm students to look at the specific discussion Forum for the answer.
Create a bank of feedback responses. Our advice is to create this using a word processor and then copy and paste the text into emails and comments boxes. We also suggest you create several acknowledgement responses that you can use to acknowledge receipt of assignments and projects.
Use specific and directed feedback on student work to create positive relationships between you and the students. Feedback can be used for small groups, large group, and individual communications.

How?

There are numerous ways to provide feedback to students. You have tools within Blackboard to facilitate feedback. You also have several productivity tools that can be used for feedback. Many of you already use TrackChanges and other tools within Micosoft Word to provide feedback. Others are more comfortable printing student work and marking it with a pen. We have faculty members using audio for feedback and others who use individual email. As with most things in teaching, much depends on your personal style and the outcomes you wish to achieve in the course.

Regular and ongoing feedback to students creates more opportunities for interaction. In distance coursework, students often don't see other students or may never see the work of their classmates. Feedback gives students a sense of whether they are hitting the mark. Feedback is also a great teaching tool if used to help students understand what was done correctly and what was not done correctly (especially if some rationale is provided to explain why something is incorrect).