Instructor
and Student Feedback
Planning
for feedback in your distance learning course
- Early
in the course require students
to contact you and interact with each other
via email or the class listserv or discussion group.
- Be
certain to provide multiple channels for feedback; including
occasional personal visits when possible, telephone office hours (toll-free
if possible), and online office hours. When setting office hours be sure
to remember your audience -- consider your student’s schedules. If most
of your students are adults who work 9 to 5, daytime office hours won't
meet their needs.
-
Take note of students who don’t participate during the first session (or
first few sessions) and contact them. You can use pre-addressed/stamped
postcards, phone conferences, or email for feedback on course content, relevancy,
pace, delivery problems, or instructional concerns.
-
Use the on-site facilitator as your ‘eyes and ears’ at
the remote class.
-
It's very important to the students for you to acknowledge that their assignments
have been received. Depending on how you set things up,
you could use an email auto-responder with an indication of when a personal
follow-up will arrive: "Rec'd assignment due 4-4-03. Will respond in
24 hours." Return assignments without delay, using fax or email when
possible.
- Teacher
to student feedback must be timely and frequent. Provide
detailed comments on written assignments, referring to additional sources
for supplementary information. Take advantage of the easy and handy tools
in Microsoft Word to grade papers submitted electronically. You can
insert comments into a paper, highlight and color-code common errors, or
even rewrite sentences that need work, and track the changes you make so
the students can see the process of re-writing at work.
- Feedback
should be personal and include grades and remediation. Check out
the HotPotatoes
or WebQuestions2 free software for ideas on how to use interactive online
quizzes. Students can use these as self-assessments. As the author, you
can build remediation into the quiz, saving you the time of writing the
same camments on each student's paper. Download
the free WebQuestions2 software here.
- Be
aware that some questions that students ask via email or on discussions
(particularly those that are clearly answered on the online syllabus or
course web pages -"When are our papers due?" or "How often
do we have to post?") might be thinly veiled attempts to gain reassurance
and social interaction. When you get those kinds of questions (and you will),
offer remediation -- tell them where the answer is, not what the
answer is. You don't want to make them afraid to ask, but you can't
spend time answering questions that have clearly been addressed.
- Online
instruction requires students and instructors to compromise
their schedules. You don't offer 24 hour feedback in your traditional classes,
so don't think you have to offer it online. There is an expectation of immediacy
online, but make it clear to the students from the outset (i.e., on your
syllabus) the hours you'll be available and what kind of turnaround they
can expect from you. Formulate and post an explicit Feedback
Policy that addresses these types of questions:
- Will
ALL emails be answered in 24 hours? 48 hours?
-
Will you refuse to answer emails that refer to questions already answered
on your syllabus (e.g. assignment due dates, grading policies, test
procedures).
-
Will you answer emails asking for further clarification or explanation
of an assignment? When? For example, your feedback policy might say:
"I will answer emails within 24 hrs, excluding weekends and holidays
and respond to urgent messages usually within 6-8 hrs. If I will be
unavailable for more than 1 day, I will post an "out-of-office"
message, indicating when I will next be available."
- One
side effect of this type of policy is that it often increases student-to-student
interaction -- students tend to ask each other questions if the instructor
isn't available.
- You
can use an auto-responder email feature to let students know you received
their message -- something like -- "message rec'd; will respond
in 48 hours or less."
- If
your institution has a mandated turn-around time
on emails (24 or 48 hrs), you might consider creating a FAQs page or a discussion
group where students can post questions and you agree to answer them every
so often -- e.g., each day at 10:00 a.m. you will check for and answer new
questions.
- You
shouldn't feel compelled to answer questions about when an assignment is
due if that is clearly spelled out on your syllabi. If you make it clear
that you will not respond to emails that ask questions about routine things
already posted on the course website, the student is forced to become self-directed
and engage the material. Spelling out your objectives clearly on your syllabus
-- and answering questions such as when an assignment is due, how long papers
must be, what topics are appropriate, etc. -- will stem the flood of emails.
-
To
ease the strain of handling large amounts of email, establish an email
etiquette emphasizing the importance of a clear and descriptive
subject line. You might even devise a coded system, in which the subject
line of an urgent message should begin with an exclamation point, emails
asking questions should begin with a question mark, or any number of possibilities:
!
My hard drive crashed and I can't access from my house!
? Why won't the link to our reading assignment work?
X I'm going to miss class tonight X
- Provide
a legend explaining each symbol
on your syllabus, along with the email etiquette policy.
- Finally
-- watch what (and how) you post!
Learn how to use language effectively online. If you tend to send short,
direct, to-the-point emails (as if often necessary with large classes),
let your students know this up front. Otherwise, a student could misconstrue
your brief response as rude or dismissive.
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Course Design >
Interaction >
General
Strategies > Feedback
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The Northeast Texas Network Consortium
Coordinating Office / 11937 Hwy 155 at Hwy 271 / Tyler, TX 75708
phone (903) 877-7510 / fax (903) 877-7430
