1. The Higher Learning Commission (HLC) requires online courses to offer "regular feedback scheduled in a timely manner throughout the course." What does this mean to you?
1. To me, “regular feedback” involves scheduling and scaffolding smaller assignments that lead into the larger projects where I have multiple opportunities to respond directly and individually.
1. This could include, engaging directly with the students through responding to their forum posts (either collating their response or responding to individuals), responding to their learning journals with written commentary (learning journals are already a reflective assignment where students respond to reading, so I plan to write comments back answering some of their questions and providing them with tips and strategies for future assignments), sometimes prompting them to conference with me (I plan to schedule conferences for each assignment after they have complete a draft and peer review, so check in with how they’re doing and go through elements of their revisions together), and also responding to their major assignments with detailed and clear rubrics.
2. “Regular” implies that there are lots of stages of response (each moment they complete an assignment that leads into their final) and “timely” for my course would mean providing them with feedback with enough time that they could reasonably respond to it in their next assignment or major project
2. How much feedback is too much feedback? Is there such a thing as too much feedback?
1. I think there could be so much feedback that students don’t know what to prioritize as they move forward to their next assignment, or I could spend too much time responding to individual forum posts when it might be more helpful for my students for me to summarize their responses and show them how their discussion is overall generating knowledge about writing etc. I struggle a bit with this because I want to provide students with as much feedback as possible, and overall I think it’s better to provide lots of opportunity for engagement, but I ultimately think it can be helpful for students to have 2-3 “key development areas” to focus on per assignment and to track throughout the course—otherwise they might get overwhelmed!
3. Does giving a student a numerical score in the gradebook count as feedback? Does there have to be written commentary to make that feedback "meaningful"?
1. I think in my case, most grades should be accompanied by written feedback for them to be meaningful. Writing is about dialectics, and the students enter into conversations with both me and their peers, so I think part of my assessment is also to respond; to tell them what’s effective about their rhetorical choices, to tell them where ideas could be clarified etc. I also think it’s good practice to explain the numerical grade so that they know what they’re doing well and what they need to keep developing. Maybe there are a few cases (forum posts or my assessment of peer reviews), where commentary might be more minimal and the numerical grade is more about the attempt to complete the work, or I might just award points for completing a section of a draft by a specific time, but I’m not evaluating the draft yet. But those assignments would be “lower stakes” and have lower point values; it’s just to prompt them to generate work that they can then continue to develop.
1. To me, “regular feedback” involves scheduling and scaffolding smaller assignments that lead into the larger projects where I have multiple opportunities to respond directly and individually.
1. This could include, engaging directly with the students through responding to their forum posts (either collating their response or responding to individuals), responding to their learning journals with written commentary (learning journals are already a reflective assignment where students respond to reading, so I plan to write comments back answering some of their questions and providing them with tips and strategies for future assignments), sometimes prompting them to conference with me (I plan to schedule conferences for each assignment after they have complete a draft and peer review, so check in with how they’re doing and go through elements of their revisions together), and also responding to their major assignments with detailed and clear rubrics.
2. “Regular” implies that there are lots of stages of response (each moment they complete an assignment that leads into their final) and “timely” for my course would mean providing them with feedback with enough time that they could reasonably respond to it in their next assignment or major project
2. How much feedback is too much feedback? Is there such a thing as too much feedback?
1. I think there could be so much feedback that students don’t know what to prioritize as they move forward to their next assignment, or I could spend too much time responding to individual forum posts when it might be more helpful for my students for me to summarize their responses and show them how their discussion is overall generating knowledge about writing etc. I struggle a bit with this because I want to provide students with as much feedback as possible, and overall I think it’s better to provide lots of opportunity for engagement, but I ultimately think it can be helpful for students to have 2-3 “key development areas” to focus on per assignment and to track throughout the course—otherwise they might get overwhelmed!
3. Does giving a student a numerical score in the gradebook count as feedback? Does there have to be written commentary to make that feedback "meaningful"?
1. I think in my case, most grades should be accompanied by written feedback for them to be meaningful. Writing is about dialectics, and the students enter into conversations with both me and their peers, so I think part of my assessment is also to respond; to tell them what’s effective about their rhetorical choices, to tell them where ideas could be clarified etc. I also think it’s good practice to explain the numerical grade so that they know what they’re doing well and what they need to keep developing. Maybe there are a few cases (forum posts or my assessment of peer reviews), where commentary might be more minimal and the numerical grade is more about the attempt to complete the work, or I might just award points for completing a section of a draft by a specific time, but I’m not evaluating the draft yet. But those assignments would be “lower stakes” and have lower point values; it’s just to prompt them to generate work that they can then continue to develop.