Feedback in Online Learning Environments

This document is an example me responding to a student who submitted a piece of writing. I respond to the student through the commenting feature. I could not embed the document in this page and keep the comments visible. Therefore, I hyperlinked the document so viewers can see the comments. 

This next video is the same assignment; however, instead of using the comment feature, I use a screencast video to respond to the writer and the writing. 

For this artifact, I used a provided student sample, composed written (comment-based) feedback and then made a screencast (Vincelette & Bostic, 2013) of me providing verbal feedback to that same student student. In this reflection, I am going to consider the affordances of each feedback modality (I almost just did an audio piece too to get the full three feedback measures, but I struggle when it is just audio feedback because I know that I am such a visual person and need to see what the speaker is looking at–but this may be an intrinsic bias I have towards visual modalities). 

In thinking about the written feedback, I started with thanking the student–this is a practice that I include in all of my feedback, regardless of modality (from small assignments to large) that thanks the student for their labor and work on the assignment. I start here to hopefully start the student off with a note of positivity (and a genuine thankfulness from me that they are in the class and doing the work). 

I referenced my use of a grading contract (Laftlen & Sims, 2021) and explained that based on the contents of my grading contract, the student would be required to compose a revision to receive credit for the assignment. This allows students to take risks, but also learn from their writing and make revisions to make the writing stronger. In my introductory comment, I mention that I will be leaving comments throughout the document (formative feedback) and more of a summative endnote (although this is not summative in the sense that it is final, it is still formative since the student would need to submit a revision). 

In looking at all of my comments, there are a lot of them. While hopefully a student knows me by this point, if they didn’t, my amount of comments may be overwhelming. Although I do like the fact that students can ask questions through the comments by tagging me (but it does get cumbersome with 100+ students and my email hates me for it). The comments I left are still reader-centric, but if read by a student who doesn’t know my tone/belief in them as a writer, it may be difficult to feel supported. So this is something I need to think about. 

The affordance of the screencast is that the student could hear my tone. I tried to be personable and energetic with my reading of the letter, and hope that my tone contributed to my wanting them to be a stronger writer as opposed to hearing, “Fix this, this, and this.” The option of dialoguing with a student is more tricky in the screencast format–students cannot respond to a specific question, unless I use a software that allows commenting throughout a video (I’m sure it exists somewhere but I have not looked). I like the reading aloud of the letter, and the screencast also allows me to use vocal inflection to note grammar issues without marking up a document with grammar notes. (As an aside, I don’t ever grade for grammar, but if there are patterns I’ll bring it up with a student and say, “Hey, you might take a look at this pattern that I’ve noticed. I’ve gotten tripped up by this, and other readers may too.”) 

One thing I didn’t note in either piece of feedback that I would want to address is the fact that the letter is one giant paragraph. This is where something like audio feedback or screencasting can be tricky, because if I want to add this comment, do I re-record the entire thing, make an additional short video, or even add it as a text comment in a LMS to the assignment? I could add a comment on the document (although the time stamps would be a bit strange since it would come so much later), but the affordance of a screencast makes it difficult to edit or add additional comments after I have thought through them. 

For this exercise I started with the written feedback and then made the screencast, so I think that prompted my thinking when making the screencast. In the future, when I  do screencasting, I think I would read the paper first, make some comments of note in a separate document, and then screencast. This would ensure that I am hitting the components I need to hit or want to hit (and make sure I don’t forget anything!). It also allows me to read the entire corpus of student texts to identify patterns that multiple writers struggled with. After identifying a pattern, I could create a short screencast video for the class addressing that pattern (and making mention of this resource in each students’ work that has this attribute). 

Overall, I have used screencasting before but I have never done a direct compare/contrast with the modalities, and this exercise made me think about how to create more dialogue-focused screencasts and also identify possible ways to make my written comments more tone-apparent. I don’t fully have answers to either of these notions, but they are things that I want to keep thinking about!