5 Tips to Reduce the Amount of Time Providing Feedback
Feedback is a crucial component of effective teaching. To understand its’ importance, consider the purpose of feedback: to provide students with information that can assist them in their development and understanding. But how do you provide quality feedback when you have 40 students in a course and you have four courses in a semester, each having multiple assignments? The answer is simple….build automatic feedback into your online course when possible and then streamline the real-time feedback process.
Build in feedback in Brightspace’s rubrics.
If you don’t use rubrics you should if for no other reason to use automated feedback. When creating a D2L rubric, you can provide feedback for each criterion and performance level on the rubric. Then, when you use the rubric, students will be able to see how you scored their performance and view the feedback associated with that score. Because you are writing this feedback at your own leisure, you can write high quality advice on how students can improve and achieve a higher performance level and subsequent assignments.
Speaking of rubrics, create a feedback rubric.
Did you know you can attach more than one rubric to a single assignment? More importantly, why would you attach multiple rubrics? Some professors use two rubrics for assignments where one rubric, usually an analytic rubric, is used for grading purposes and a second, holistic rubric is used to provide in-depth guidance/feedback.
Utilize TurnItIn’s Grademark.
Brightspace’s (D2L) integrated plagiarism detection feature is TurnItIn.com. For the purposes of e recommend you enable the originality checker in order to gain access to Grademark, Turnitin’s mark-up and feedback tool. According to Turnitin, “GradeMark saves instructors time and provides students with richer feedback on written work.” Watch this demonstration video to learn more.
When providing line item feedback when grading term papers, use Brightspace’s “Add Feedback Files” feature.
Do you like to provide detailed feedback on student papers by making corrections in Microsoft Word to their original documents? If so, Brightspace Dropbox allows you to download the student’s original work, make changes, and then upload it back into the system so you students can see your changes/recommendations. What makes this a great feature is you can upload all of your feedback files at one time and the system will automatically match the feedback file to the correct student. If you are interested in learning more about this method, contact one of the CeCE Instructional Designers.
Comment, yes. Correct, no.
When you see a feedback box in Brightspace, remember this one simple rule: Comment, Don’t Correct. If you believe you need to correct your student’s work, use email or personal conferences (or one of the above methods) to provide that level of feedback. Use the feedback boxes to provide commentary on the student’s overall performance and tips on how they can improve on a more general level.