Individualized feedback on student work, over and above grade scores, is one of the most important sites and situations for student learning in an online course.  Here, students get an opportunity to try out creating or composing, and getting a sense from a professional - the professor - what steps they should take to improve their work and more broadly, develop themselves.  

Obviously, the feedback we give to students on their composition should be a big part of how they learn.  But it's frustrating when students don't bother reading, or don't seem to properly employ our instructions for revision, or for improvement of their work.  Here's some tips to help make the feedback you give on student work more effective.  This could be for assignments each student submits to you, or for group work or discussion posts. 

Growth as a Course Feature

We often design assignments without significantly considering how we will assess them.  (We know what we want to see, but what will we do with what students actually submit to us?)  Why not design assignments with feedback process in mind?

Rubrics  

We will discuss rubrics in greater depth next week, but for, suffice to say, why not develop the rubric alongside your assignment prompt?  You can write better assignment instructions if you have a better idea of what and how you will assess.

A series of Similar Assignments

If you plan to offer only a few points of actionable feedback per student, per assignment, you can make the most of as instructions for each student on how to tackle a quite similar assignment later in the course.  Consider adopting a multi-stage development assignment, or a series of smaller, similar assignments in your course. Designed to teach as well as assess a set of research, analysis, writing or creative skills, such assignments can help your students systematically learn better scholarship and composition as well as help you understand how students learn, and where they typically suffer setbacks or snags.  As students overcome one challenge, you can pose others to them in subsequent assignments, and by the end of the semester they should be demonstrably better at whatever is described in your learning goals and objectives for the course.