The information that follows below on this page is excerpted from a Chronicle of Higher Education piece by Holly Fiock and Heather Garcia, How to Give Your Students Better Feedback with Technology (Nov. 11, 2019). This practical advice piece is a great read to help you consider how you are planning to give feedback to your students, and it also includes links to some feedback tools and resources. You are strongly encouraged to read the entire article, but following are some of the highlights, for at-a-glance review purposes.

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Read the full article: How to Give Your Students Better Feedback with Technology (Nov. 11, 2019).

Guiding Questions

Should your approach to feedback be consistent throughout the course, or should it vary from assignment to assignment? For instance, are there points in your course at which students might benefit more from positive encouragement versus constructive criticism (and vice versa)? Are there assignments for which specific, detailed suggestions for improvement are more valuable than general temperature-readings of how they're doing and whether they're hitting the mark (or vice versa)?
What strategies and tools can you use to provide personalized feedback to students on their work while also making your grading and feedback process more efficient?
How do your choices about feedback—when to provide it, what type of feedback to give, what formats and tools to use in providing it, and what tone to strike—connect to the idea of instructor presence (which was introduced previously, in Module 2)?
How will you ensure your feedback is accessible by all students, regardless of form?

Definitions

[Feedback entails] the various types of guidance and direction that instructors provide: corrections or positive reinforcement after an exam, explanations on written work, details and notes included as part of rubric grading. Monitoring student learning through regular assessment is an important element of an instructor’s job. By providing individualized feedback, you help students stay on track, personalize their learning, and build trust and connections.
'Feedback tools' [are] digital applications or extensions used to give responses to your students’ work. There are a number of options available:
- Rubrics: online scoring guides to evaluate students’ work.
- Annotations: notes or comments added digitally to essays and other assignments.
- Audio: a sound file of your voice giving feedback on students’ work.
- Video: a recorded file of you offering feedback either as a “talking head,” a screencast, or a mix of both.
- Peer review: online systems in which students review one another’s work.

Feedback is not the same as criticism. While often conflated, they are distinct activities with different end goals. Criticism involves judgment and faultfinding, while feedback is evaluative and corrective.... Feedback should tell the recipients where they erred and how they can do better next time. The goal of any evaluation and feedback should be to support the learning process, help students understand where they did not meet established standards, and aid them in identifying what they can do better next time. Feedback should guide them toward building new knowledge and increasing their skills.

General Advice

It is normal to feel overwhelmed by the excess of options...[but] remember: It’s not the type of tool that matters, but how you use it.Students will not be wowed by your video feedback on their work if it doesn’t make sense, is unhelpful, or took you three weeks to produce.
The most important piece of the whole equation is the feedback itself. At no point should you use a tool just because it is cool or trendy — use it only if it helps you communicate better with your students. Good feedback should always be frequent, specific, balanced, and timely.

Frequent: Provide students at least one opportunity a week to receive your feedback. It doesn’t have to be a big weekly assignment — it can be something as small as giving an in-class quiz or responding to a student’s discussion post.
Specific: Good feedback not only details the areas for improvement but offers actionable advice. Merely telling a student “this needs work” does not provide any guidance on how to fix the problem.
Balanced: You shouldn’t shy away from pointing out weaknesses in students’ work, but neither should you avoid highlighting their successes. Letting students know what they did well is empowering and reinforcing. Affirm their strengths to balance the flaws in their work. Some call that approach the “feedback sandwich” — corrective feedback sandwiched between positive feedback.
Timely: For it to be most useful, feedback should be given as soon as possible.

Feedback can be a powerful force in college classrooms, and there are ways to make the experience of providing and receiving it even stronger. That’s especially important as students continue to report dissatisfaction with the feedback they get on assignments and tests — calling it vague, discouraging, and/or late. (See Mulliner, E. and Tucker, M. (2017). Feedback on feedback practice: Perceptions of students and academics. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, (42)2,266–288. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2015.1103365).
Technology does not automatically help you give and receive feedback that is more effective, engaging, and timely—it must be use thoughtfully and intentionally.

When it comes to feedback, students and instructors often are not on the same page:

Students want feedback with specific, detailed directions for future improvement, offered in a manner that is both constructive and encouraging. And they want that advice sooner rather than later. Many studies have shown that the ideal time for learners to receive feedback ranges from two to 15 work days. Beyond that point, students have moved on to other topics and learning activities and the feedback is much less helpful.
Meanwhile, instructors, according to one study, “tended to believe their feedback was more useful, fair, understandable, constructive and encouraging and detailed in comparison to what students felt they were receiving.”
Say you have to grade a lot of papers with extensive formatting, outline, or grammatical concerns. Embedded comments and tracked changes will do the trick. You can walk students through all of your concerns and show them exactly how to do something or what it should look like.
Looking for a way to provide fast feedback? Audio may be your best bet. You can quickly record your voice and send the files off to each student.
Maybe you have to help students through a complicated problem with multiple steps. Video feedback may be the solution. (We’ll discuss this more below in the “When to Use Audio or Video Tools for Feedback” section.)

On Saving Time

Two time-saving techniques — rubrics and peer review — are essential to providing specific and balanced feedback.
- Use rubrics whenever possible. A rubric is helpful, not just for your own grading, but also to give students a clear understanding of the evaluation criteria before they even begin the assignment. Your grading is more transparent to students, and less prone to bias, when you use a rubric. [...Additionally], a digital rubric speeds up the grading process by allowing you to click on the appropriate criterion and automatically tally the points and calculate the grade.
- Peer review can be a major time saver in large classes. The idea here is for students to evaluate one another’s work. Peer review is especially useful when students are working on scaffolded assignments with multiple opportunities for feedback. With a lot of students, you might not find it feasible to provide frequent and robust feedback in a timely manner at each stage of the assignment. Instead, ask peers to evaluate the earliest drafts, so that students can make improvements before submitting their final version to you for grading. [Although] peer review can be a logistical challenge...most learning-management systems have peer-review tools that make it easier to assign peers and manage the process.

Providing Audio and/or Video Feedback

We are strong advocates of video and audio feedback.... Whatever your reservations about audio and video, we would urge every faculty member to give it a try.
Written feedback is easy to misconstrue. Students often read it as harsher than you intend. By providing feedback with your voice, however, your students will be able to listen to your tone and understand that you are being encouraging and are directing their learning.
Overall, when instructors use audio or video technologies, they tend to provide more feedback than written text alone. Yet, we’ve found that — once you learn the ropes — using audio or video feedback can save time. There is a learning curve at first. But the more you become familiar with these feedback tools, the more time you will save, and the more productive you will become as an instructor.
Finding the right time and place to use technology [to provide audio and video feedback] is easier than you might think. Keep in mind: It’s not just about doing this part of your job more quickly or efficiently — it’s about making your feedback more effective for students.
We recommend you limit audio and video feedback to three to five minutes.

[The following are just] a few scenarios in which audio and video feedback might be the best solution to a pedagogical challenge:

You want to personalize your feedback.

A grading rubric may identify common trouble spots in an assignment, but won’t necessarily highlight the specific errors holding an individual student back. That’s where a video-feedback tool comes in handy. A screencast video of a student’s assignment, coupled with you walking the student through the project using audio feedback, allows you to provide detailed, one-on-one support and build a closer connection with every student.

Or maybe, in evaluating a student’s paper, you usually make handwritten notes and then refer back to them in deciding on the final grade and feedback. With audio or video feedback, you can record your observations, saving time since most of us speak faster than we can type. Audio and video notes typically are more detailed, too.

You want to convey nuance.

There are many times — and many content areas — in which conveying nuance is important. For example, if you are teaching a communications course that emphasizes tone, body language, and social skills, it’s easier to show rather than tell. With video feedback, you can show students exactly what you mean.

The same goes for foreign-language courses. Instructors can use audio files to ensure that tones and dialects are being used or learned properly. Just as you would demonstrate good writing in a writing class, you should demonstrate best practices in a speech-related course.

You want to demonstrate a process.

In some content areas, such as mathematics, chemistry, and physics, getting the right answer means completing steps in a certain order. Communicating to your learners exactly where an error occurred in a process can be challenging. By using screencasting software, you can point to the exact location of a student’s error and show how it affected the outcome.

You want to avoid miscommunication.

We’ve all received an email or text that came off as angry or downright rude. Chances are that wasn’t the sender’s intention. If you find that students seem to misinterpret your written communication, or if you receive student evaluation data that show you are perceived as cold and impersonal, may help to resolve those problems. Audio and video tools allow students to hear your intonation, listen to you laugh, watch when you are serious, and see when things are OK but could use some polishing.

You want to improve your pedagogy.

Faculty interest in classroom innovation is on the rise. Professors are trying all sorts of new techniques to make their teaching more engaging, to achieve better discussions, [etc....] When you try innovative approaches, your usual evaluation techniques may no longer be sufficient. For example, if you assign a project in which the choice of content is subjective or open-ended, a one-size-fits-all grading process may no longer work. Here, again, audio and video feedback can come to the rescue, allowing you to personalize your feedback on a broad array of projects.

You want to be more connected and “present” in your classroom.

Especially in an online classroom, audio or video feedback may help students feel less isolated. [...] When you use audio or video feedback, especially in online environments, students begin to see you as a real person giving feedback — not just someone behind a computer screen. You become human.

You want to keep up with the times.

Think of the last time you needed to fix something. Did you ransack the house looking for the owner’s manual, or did you quickly search for a how-to video on YouTube? If you did the latter, think of all of your students who are probably doing the same.

Your learners may be more open to watching and listening to what you have to say, more so than reading it.... By using video and audio feedback tools, you are helping students solve their study-related problems in much the same way that they (or you) would have hopped on YouTube to find out how to change a tire.

Providing Written Feedback

Sometimes, written feedback is still your best bet. Even when that’s the case, technology can help you provide that written feedback with greater efficiency. For example, if your assignment requirements are clearly laid out, with straightforward and well-defined expectations, you might be better off using an online rubric that allows brief text-based comments.

Here are a few digital options for text-based feedback:

Annotation tools. Annotation tools [allow you] to leave comments and feedback directly on a student submission. You can use them without having to download each and every file, which saves a lot of time.
Built-in rubrics. Built-in rubrics offer time-saving features such as reusable comments and a total-points column that will automatically add up the points you’ve assigned for each criterion of the rubric — another time-saver.
Automated feedback. Also known as “computer-assisted assessment,” this tool basically lets you reuse your written feedback. Some LMS rubrics or other grading platforms allow you to save a comment you wrote for one student and use it again for others who made the same mistake or achieved the same success. In addition, [you can] preprogram question-specific — or even answer-specific — feedback for your auto-graded quizzes.
Electronic surveys or live polling. Both have gained in popularity as a fast way to gauge how well your class as a whole is understanding the material. A thumbs-up rating, a star system, or a simple yes-or-no question can give you valuable feedback on class topics and help you tailor the content and emphasis. You can also use surveys and polls to get a quick read on how students think the course is going, and then make adjustments.

Using Technology to Provide Feedback: Tips for Getting Started

Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Just as you support learners, there are people [at your university] — e.g., instructional designers, educational technologists, information technologists — who want to help and support you, too.
Start with tools your institution already has. One of the easiest ways to get started is to use the digital-feedback tools integrated into your campus LMS [i.e., Canvas]. They’ve already been used and tested, meaning that many bugs or tweaks have been worked out and solutions to common issues are readily available.
Try the digital-feedback tools of a system with which you are already comfortable. Instead of trying to learn a new technology, consider what screencasting software or web-conferencing tools you use for other work purposes. The transition may be easier because the learning curve is less steep.
Mix it up. One size does not fit all. There is no universal best practice for providing feedback. So vary your approach. Use a mix of rubrics, written comments, annotations, and audio or video. The feedback tool should fit the student and the activity. For example, you would not offer the same type of feedback for a multiple-choice quiz as you would for a 10-page paper. Context is critical when it comes to using technology in your classroom and giving feedback.
Make sure your choices are accessible for everyone. As with all course design, accessibility should be taken into consideration when giving feedback. If you create audio or video feedback, make sure all students can access it. If you are unable to provide captions or transcripts, ask students if they prefer written comments. If the tool you are using provides automatic captioning, make sure you speak clearly for the greatest accuracy. A broad range of students benefit from accessible feedback tools, not just those with particular needs.
Ask your students. They are happy to tell you how they feel about your teaching methods or other aspects of the course, especially when granted anonymity.
Expect a few roadblocks. That includes technology limits — on file sizes or on downloading or access issues (for those with slow or limited internet). You will also face cost limitations. But as with anything, the more familiar you become with these tools, the better they will work for you and your students.

Common Pitfalls and Solutions

Don’t assume technology will solve every problem. It’s worth repeating: Context is critical when it comes to using technology. If your course evaluations rate your feedback as lousy, delivering it via a shiny new digital tool is unlikely to fix the root of the problem.
Avoid making long videos. Be sensitive to students’ time and file-size constraints. Just because they prefer audio or video feedback doesn’t mean they want to sit through an overly long recording. That may deter them from watching/listening at all... We would recommend that you keep your feedback recordings to under five minutes. Try to be concise and on topic in your feedback. This is not the time for a lecture.
Video and audio feedback doesn’t have to be perfect. You can waste a lot of time trying to edit out every pause, “um,” or mistake. You can’t go back and delete those verbal tics in real time, so don’t worry about doing so digitally. In fact, hearing your actual voice and tone is one element of audio and video feedback that appeals to students.
There is such a thing as too much information. In creating videos, it’s easy to overlook cognitive overload. In layman’s terms, that is when you present too much information too fast. Make sure you only talk about whatever it is you are pointing to on the video. If you are talking about a paper’s organization but suddenly start highlighting another element (say a table or graph), you risk confusing the student. To minimize that problem, use the cursor or a highlighting tool to point out exactly what you are talking about so that your voice and the image(s) align for the learner. That is called signaling, and it helps to reduce the cognitive load for your students.
Have a plan. Don’t add a new digital tool at the last minute or without preparation. The technology may have limits or issues that you need to be aware of. Become familiar with the tool and its limitations. Plan how you will use it.

All content on this page is excerpted from Fiock, H. & Garcia, H. (2019, Nov 17 ). How to give your students better feedback with technology. Chronicle of Higher Education.