Challenges Providing Feedback to All Students in an Online
Course
Giving feedback to students in a F2F class is already
difficult since you want to treat them all equally with timely assertive and
proactive assessment. Can one imagine how it is to give feedback to learners in
an online course? To be empathetic to all students in terms of assessment and to
give them what they deserve to fully develop their knowledge and understanding
in the subject matter of one’s course, it is needed to consider the following
details: 1) students’ course engagement, 2) instructors’
commitment to his/her course, and 3) changes
in the course evaluation.
Students’ course engagement is one of those elements to
consider when giving feedback to them. Learners have to be active participants
in online learning; the course is designed for them to acquire knowledge that
they can apply in real contexts in their lives. But what if students don’t feel fully
engaged in forum participation, personal reflections, and course assignments?
In that point, one starts to question how students can –firstly- be motivated
to work on the course content for the teacher to be able to deliver timely,
formative feedback. For that reason, it is imperative that teachers explain
learners what the expectations for the online course are. By large, students
should become very responsible for their own learning, which can be well guided
by the instructor to enhance it. If such responsibility is exercised by the
student, no doubt that teachers can give all students the feedback that they
need.
Once students have understood course expectations and
their responsibilities, teacher commitment to providing ongoing feedback is the
next ingredient to mix in our online student feedback recipe. Part
of the course expectations is much related to instructors. In other words, not
only teachers but also learners need to bear in mind when they are meant to
provide student feedback to class members and how frequent. Instructors must
have an online working agenda to guarantee their teaching and social presence
with their students. Among the agenda’s duties, it is important to have some
room for online student hours to provide feedback in situ. In this way, learners can have a way to contact
instructors to get guidance and some formative assessment. Additionally, it is
also essential for teachers to have already-prepared feedback rubrics to answer
FAQs learners may have while developing assignments, projects, and the like.
Formative assessment is a crucial factor in providing
students timely and quality feedback, but what happens if the course grading criteria aims at
giving learners summative grades? As
it can be seen in many colleges, higher education institutions, or schools,
most of the course outlines or programs signal the importance of summative
assessment since its end is to provide students with a passing or failing
grade. Summative feedback does not allow instructors to monitor student
learning per se. It can give teachers an idea of what’s going on with
individual students, but in an online classroom, formative assessment can
address problems in a timely fashion and allow time to assist students who are struggling
with course content. But what happens if teachers cannot make changes in the
course evaluation to fit it to VLEs? If faculty authorities do not give some
sort of freedom to their instructors, providing feedback to a whole online
class turns a failure from the start.
If a teacher really wants to give his/her students
timely and quality feedback, three elements need to be stressed to make this
happen. The instructor needs to engage students by making them commit to their
learning and the platform/course responsibilities. Student commitment is not
enough if s/he does not set a realistic working agenda to satisfactorily
deliver feedback to students who need it or who are looking for guidance to
complete projects appropriately. But on top of all, it is also necessary that
faculty authorities give teachers some sort of grading criteria freedom to move
away from pure summative assessment to a symbiosis of formative-summative
feedback to satisfy students’ need for learning.
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E To fully develop and comprehend this teaching issue,
it’s advisable to research and expand these areas:
1
|
Student commitment in VLEs
|
2
|
Setting course participation
expectations
|
3
|
Instructor working agendas in online
teaching
|
4
|
How to transform a summative evaluation
into formative
|
5
|
The difference between summative and formative
feedback
|
Professor
Jonathan
Acuña-Solano
ELT
Instructor & Trainer based in Costa Rica
Freelance ELT Consultant four OUP in
Central America
For
further comments or suggestions, reach me at:
@jonacuso –
Twitter
Other blogs and sites I often write for my students at
the university are:
Get new ELT material and ideas by
visiting my curated topics on http://paper.li/ and http://scoop.it/
Get a copy of "Challenges Providing Feedback to All Students in an Online Course by Jonathan Acuña" right over here.
Sunday, August 11, 2013
