Online Communication skills

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The Art of Teaching Online: Darci Harland – Providing Actionable Feedback

The Art of Teaching Online: Darci Harland – Providing Actionable Feedback Program Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DARCI HARLAND: Providing actionable feedback is actually really important to students. That can come in lots of different forms. Traditionally in online learning, that comes in the form of using track changes, where the text color is different. You can edit student text, and they can see where those changes have been made very, very easily.

It also comes in the form of using insert comments, which is a feature in Word that a lot of online instructors use. And what I like to do is, with those long-term projects, allow for there to be a conversation between you and the student about their ideas and about their writing. We call that iterative writing and thinking.

And so it actually becomes a conversation, almost as if every draft they turn in is like they were sitting with you in your office during office hours. And you're saying, you know, this, what you said here, really, really brings the point home. But if you added this, this might really be helpful. And students react really well to that most times.

And so that's the traditional way that you can provide feedback. But there's some new, innovative ways too that you can talk to students about what they're doing in your class. One of them is to provide a video, maybe just like the one you're watching of me talking to you. A video of you talking about their work can be very, very powerful.

You can also do that just with audio, kind of like a podcast form. And when I've done this, what you can do is, within their paper that you return to them, you mark certain areas. So you might highlight a certain area, and say, that's text B, text C, text D. And then as you talk to them in the audio, say, if you look at your paper, at the text I highlighted and labeled B, you'll notice-- and then you just talk to them about it, rather than writing out that information. And students really do like that sort of feedback as well.

Another thing you need to remember about feedback is that it's not your opinion. You shouldn't be giving feedback to students saying-- or a value statement, like well, this is just poorly written. A student who needs help, when you say this is poorly written, that could mean 200 different things, and they're not going to be able to improve based on that feedback.

My advice for giving actionable feedback is to describe what you see. I like to say show the data. What is the data showing?

The Art of Teaching Online: Darci Harland – Providing Actionable Feedback

So you look at a paragraph, and it doesn't make any sense. And you just say, this paragraph does not have a topic sentence, OK? The student-- you've now identified the problem for them. And now that's actionable.

You could even then add a sentence that says, to improve the readability of this paragraph, you need to add a topic sentence. And that may seem like it's labor- intensive, but if you don't give them very, very specific data as to what is wrong, they're not going to know how to fix it.

And so that is something that takes practice in doing, because I'm sure you don't want to come across as, change this, do this, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. But I think you'll find that students actually appreciate knowing exactly what's wrong, rather than just, this is nice or change this or improve this, because they won't know how to improve it.