Week 11 - Practicum Week - Effective Feedback

Introduction

This was an interesting week as we had to put our heads together as a group and come up with a topic for discussion on the moodle ED403 webpage. Group work is not my strong suit but with a great bunch of team members we decided on a subject for the week, - Giving Effective Feedback,  drafted some questions for the 2 discussion forums. One thing I really enjoyed as part of this was making a video for introducing the topic and our Team. I used my camera to shoot a small video with a transcript in tow. I have always been interested in making a video and i managed to download the windows live movie maker. After much editing and some trial and error I managed to make a nice video ( if i may say so myself!!). Later i also used dropbox for the first time to share my files with the course instructor.

Key Points

The 2 critical elements of effective feedback are: -

Feedback needs to be specific. Peter Jensen (2012) rates being specific while giving feedback as the number one rule of effective feedback. It’s no use giving general feedback to students such as ‘you have done well in this assignment…well done!’ or ‘this paper was not to the standard expected…you have scored a C’. This sort of general feedback gives no idea to the student on where they went right and where they did not. It does not tell them exactly what was done right or wrong. Thereby the student remains uncertain on what they could improve on and even how they can improve their work. The whole idea of feedback is to give student some indication on how they are doing so they can reach their academic goals. Giving general feedback or statements of achievement defeat the whole purpose of the process of giving feedback to students.

The other critical element of effective feedback in my opinion is the timely feedback. It’s no use to the students if they find out how they performed in a test weeks or months after they have sat for it. The way some of the courses are structured, the main assessments are done at the end of the semester so after the students sit for these assessments they go on their break and come back the next semester to start another course. Often students are only interested in knowing the grades which they receive on the website and if they do not inquire with the course convener no formal feedback is actually given to them. This practice is quite common in higher education and perhaps assessments need to be structured differently or instructors to have greater frequency of low stakes assessments throughout the semester. Of course this means more marking for the instructor!

Resources

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/sept12/vol70/num01/Seven-Keys-to-Effective-Feedback.aspx

http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/resources/database/id353_senlef_guide.pdf

http://www.faculty.londondeanery.ac.uk/e-learning/feedback/giving-feedback

Reflection

The week was a huge learning curve for me. I really developed a sense of appreciation for my fellow class mates who managed to pitch in during the week and act as moderators for the whole week. Although I always prefer to work on my own, i was really glad to have a group to work with as the burden was shared and also we supported each other during the lead up to the practicum week. Our instructor Shikha was always there answering our questions and guiding us in the right direction.
I managed to barely log into the Moodle site from Kiribati as the internet connectivity was an issue and the if there was a connection then it was really slow. I tried to log onto the ED403 USP Moodle from the Nursing school (PNO building - Kiribati) and it took 5 minutes for all the weeks of work to display on the screen then every time i had to exit the page it took another 5 minutes to load the same page again. I also tried to use the internet at the hotel i was staying at but unfortunately during that week the internet provider decided to cut the connection because there was a dispute over the payment of a bill. This made me realize how it must be for my classmates who live in Kiribati or other parts of the Pacific that face similar issues.