Challenges Providing Feedback to All Students in an Online Course

Assessment, Feedback, Hybrid and Blended Learning, Online Teaching Practices, Reflective Teaching, Student Interest, Teacher Development, Teaching 0 comments

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.

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