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Job Sterling Personal Feedback Plan
Hidson and Elliott (2019) found that formative feedback had the most impact on summative outcomes for students whose grades were 40% to 49% range in an online course. In my thirty-seven (37) years as a tutor, facilitator, teacher, coach, or any other training role, I always had prize winners among the students I taught. However, the students that mastered the concepts and became prize winners were A-grade students before their encounter with me and continued their sterling performances with other lecturers. Thus, while I was happy to be part of their academic lives, I got my most excellent satisfaction from teaching students who were marginal failures - 40% to 49% - and seeing the transformation in their lives when they were able to overcome mental blocks, build confidence, and become productive citizens. Indeed, over these decades, I had many opportunities to provide multi-dimensional feedback to my tutelages. Next, I will describe five (5) aspects of feedback that I consider to be the most important, backed by strong support from the extant literature.
5 Most Important Aspects of Feedback
The five (5) most important aspects of feedback (See Figure1) are that it should be: informational (Cohen, 1985; Hassan et al., 2019), timely (Martin et al., 2019; Martin et al., 2020), constructive (Dias et al., 2020), reflective (Ducasse & Hill, 2019), and periodic (Martin et al., 2018). The above properties allow the online facilitator to effectively connect with online participants, establish an online presence, and provide helpful and timely information. The objective is to reduce online isolation for course participants and build a useful dialog for developing the participants’ critical thinking capacity and self-reflection capabilities. While, the presence of the above aspects is useful indicators of a successful approach in giving feedback, there remain challenges in the practical implementation in a live online setting.
Figure 1
5 Most Important Aspects of Feedback
Feedback Aspects and Steps to Achieve Success
Teaching in an online setting is challenging because of learners' diversity in levels of knowledge, flexibility in delivery – asynchronous, synchronous, etc., and the rapidity of technological change (Gillett-Swan, 2017). Hence, the steps required to achieve success in this scenario must have the same degree of adaptability as the situation it attempts to address. Furthermore, the participants’ mastery of the subject matter would significantly affect the approach adopted. Therefore, in this plan, the steps outlined in Figure 2 are most effective for dealing with a participant in the marginal failure band of 40% – 49 % from the literature. The equivalent band in COSTAATT would be the 60% - 69% band. Finally, the facilitator must respect the expressed wishes of the student for engagement, dialog, and reflection.
Figure 2
Feedback Aspects and Steps to Achieve Success
Conclusion
Facilitating in an online environment requires significant experience, as evidenced by the teaching experience (an average of 20 years) of the eight awardees for excellence. None of them had less than five years in online teaching experience (Martin et al., 2019). Among the five aspects, I would rank informational and timely feedback as the top requirements based on the evidence that it can transform a marginal failure participant into an excellent performer by taking corrective action early. Therefore, a value-based approach demands that feedback needs to be strategic and targeted to those participants who can make the best use of it. It does not mean that the geniuses and underperformers do not require feedback. In closing, it means that there is a need for more research on these outlier groups.
References
Cohen, V. B. (1985). A reexamination of feedback in computer-based instruction: Implications for instructional design. Educational Technology, 25(1), 33-37. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44424353
Dias, S. B., Dolianiti, F. S., Hadjileontiadou, S. J., Diniz, J. A., & Hadjileontiadis, L. J. (2020). On modeling the quality of concept mapping toward more intelligent online learning feedback: a fuzzy logic-based approach. Universal Access in the Information Society, 19(3), 485–498. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-019-00656-z
Ducasse, A. M., & Hill, K. (2019). Developing student feedback literacy using educational technology and the reflective feedback conversation. Practitioner Research in Higher Education, 12(1), 24-37. https://ojs.cumbria.ac.uk/index.php/prhe/article/view/513
Hassan, L., Dias, A., & Hamari, J. (2019). How motivational feedback increases user’s benefits and continued use: A study on gamification, quantified-self and social networking. International Journal of Information Management, 46, 151-162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2018.12.004
Hidson, E., & Elliott, I. (2019, September 19-20). Spanning the grade boundaries: The impact of formative feedback on summative outcomes in a distance learning PGCE course [Conference presentation]. First Annual Faculty of Education and Society Research Institute Staff Research Conference, Sunderland, UK.
Gillett-Swan, J. (2017). The challenges of online learning: Supporting and engaging the isolated learner. Journal of Learning Design, 10(1), 20-30. https://doi.org/10.5204/jld.v9i3.293
Martin, F., Ritzhaupt, A., Kumar, S., & Budhrani, K. (2019). Award-winning faculty online teaching practices: Course design, assessment and evaluation, and facilitation. The Internet and Higher Education, 42, 34-43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2019.04.001
Martin, F., Wang, C., & Sadaf, A. (2018). Student perception of helpfulness of facilitation strategies that enhance instructor presence, connectedness, engagement and learning in online courses. The Internet and Higher Education, 37, 52-65. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2018.01.003
Martin, F., Wang, C., & Sadaf, A. (2020). Facilitation matters: Instructor perception of helpfulness of facilitation strategies in online courses. Online Learning, 24(1), 28-49. https://olj.onlinelearningconsortium.org/index.php/olj/index
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