Constructive Feedback Course

Rolinska, A. and Guariento, B. (2017) Constructive Feedback Course. [Website]

Abstract

This short online course aims to help the students develop an understanding of what constructive feedback is and offers them an opportunity to practise giving such feedback in the context of texts related to science, engineering and technology. The course is conceived as a preparation course for the EAST Project during which engineering students from Gaza were asked to act as critical friends offering content-oriented feedback to pre-sessional students at the University of Glasgow. We believe the course can be offered on its own, either in isolation or as part of a wider mentoring scheme for students who want to develop skills in ‘leadership by example’[2]. The course can easily be adapted for any discipline - this would require changing the samples in tasks 5 and 6. The course is intended to be delivered over two weeks and it is run online and asynchronously. In terms of design, it follows the framework of exploration - integration - application (Garrison and Arbaugh, 2007), with each stage being progressively more complex, challenging and open-ended. The students work in groups and the teacher monitors interactions and motivates them to stay on task and track in regard with deadlines via a closed Facebook group. The final task requires submitting an assessed assignment which the tutor gives feedback on. After that there is an extra week for reflection and evaluation. Timings for each activity are approximate and may need to be adjusted depending on the general progress of the course. See the course overview for details. The main technology used is Google Docs and it is recommended that the students have gmail accounts. Although students without gmail accounts are still able to access and edit the materials, tracking their contributions will not be possible. When setting up the documents, attention has to be paid to shareability settings so that there is no barrier to access. Padlet is used for sharing personal experiences and reflections at the beginning and end of the course respectively. A closed Facebook group is used as a news and discussions forum and for collective feedback. A public blog may be used for documenting the process. All the documents are created by the teacher; he or she creates an empty template for each group[3] and pastes the subsequent tasks into them on the task start date. This increases the teacher’s workload but helps them monitor their students’ progress and has a motivational effect on the students. An alternative approach would to be to ask the students to copy the template, and the task instructions could be provided in other ways, for example via Facebook, in order to decrease the workload. The course can be enriched by synchronous sessions during which the teacher can provide collective feedback and the students have an opportunity to ask questions and express their concerns. Adding a video element, for example to introduce the whole course, individual tasks or to give feedback, may constitute an added value too.

• Item Type: Website
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Guariento, Mr William and Rolinska, Ms Anna
• Authors: Rolinska, A., and Guariento, B.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Modern Languages and Cultures > Language Centre
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2017 The Authors
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License

Related URLs

• Project Website