E Feedback for E Assignments
David Lloyd, PhD

Imagine if you will for a moment, that you have lost one of your primary senses – sight, hearing or touch.  This loss of sensory feedback will have a significant effect on how you interact and respond to the world.  A similar lack of feedback from teachers can be a significant factor in whether students are ultimately successful in their courses and program.

Providing feedback to students is a vital role for teachers. In a well-known article, Chickering and Gamson (1987) presented their Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education.  Principle four deals with the importance of prompt feedback. The president of Winona State University, in an article posted on the university’s web site, writes about the important of providing feedback to students.

Students need appropriate and timely feedback on performance to get the maximum benefit from their education. They need frequent opportunities to perform and receive suggestions for improvement, and they need to learn how to assess and evaluate their own learning and competency progress.

Feedback and Technology
Technology now allows students to submit their assignments electronically, whether in face-to-face, blended, or online courses. In courses where it is not possible to physically return a student assignment, a new challenge for teachers is how to give feedback on this work.  Perhaps another way of phrasing this idea would be, If students can submit their assignments electronically, shouldn’t faculty be able to return feedback in the same manner?

Types of Feedback
When students submit their work electronically, there are two types of feedback faculty should give. The first is acknowledgement feedback – a quick response to the learner acknowledging receipt of the assignment. The second type involves providing comments and suggestions about the quality of the work and areas for improvement.

Faculty disagree on the kind of feedback to best facilitate student learning. Some argue that they should only comment on higher-level concepts and ideas and students are responsible for ensuring that their papers are grammatically sound.  My personal approach is a more granular one. I highlight errors in spelling and sentence structure. Each faculty member should decide a personal approach, keeping in mind that the more feedback a student has, the more information there is from which to learn.

Tools for Feedback
There are at least three common ways that technology can be used to provide feedback on digitally-submitted work.  It really does not matter which method you choose, the important idea is that you do not allow technology issues to become an excuse for not giving feedback. Microsoft Word 2003 has a tool called Tracking Changes.  That is discussed in the following article.  This method’s advantage is that Word is commonly available software. 

Tablet PCs are becoming more popular, which allows a teacher to actually ‘write’ on the screen of the computer using a stylus.  Comments that resemble those of a ‘hard-copy mark up’ of a paper can be written and saved. This is an effective way of providing feedback but the disadvantage lies in the current cost of a tablet PC.
 
The third method, the one that I am currently using, uses Adobe Acrobat Professional.  This software package has Commenting and Drawing Mark-ups toolbars found in the Tools menu item.  These toolbars can be made visible in Acrobat Professional as shown below.

The advantage of this method is that the features (Text Edits, Note Tool, Arrow tool etc) in these toolbars are easy to use.  The disadvantage is that not everyone has access to Acrobat  Professional.  

Students usually send you their assignments as Word files.  When Acrobat Professional is installed on your computer, you can open the file in Word and convert it to a PDF file.  Now open the file in Acrobat Professional, add your comments, save them and return the assignment electronically through e-mail or Blackboard.  The student only needs the free Acrobat Reader software to view your comments.

Feedback Sample
A sample of some hypothetical student work has been ‘marked up’ with Acrobat is available by clicking here. The comments may not display correctly in older versions of Acrobat Reader.  If this is the case you can update your version of the free Acrobat Reader by clicking here. 

Student Reactions
Students usually respond positively to constructive feedback.  A graduate student recently wrote to me about my feedback in an e-mail.

Hi David,

Please find attached my personal reflection paper. Thank you for your commitment to my growth as an emerging IT constructivist teacher. Your positive feedback on my Group Paper was greatly appreciated and I hope my efforts in this submission find you well and eager to begin a wonderful summer!

Harvey

Obtaining Acrobat Software
Acrobat software can be obtained in many ways.  It can be purchased in computer stores, in campus bookstores (usually at an educational price) or online.  Many schools will have site licenses that allow faculty the right to use the software.  You can also download trial versions from the Adobe web site at http://www.adobe.com or for an educational discount check out the Academic Superstore, CCV Software, or Gradware for example.
 
References

Chickering, Arthur M and Gamson, Zelda (1987).  Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education.  AAHE Journal, March 1987, 3-7.

Winona State University (2006).  The Seven Principles for Good Practice.  Retrieved October 30, 2006 from this link.

David Lloyd, PhD, is Adjunct Faculty in the M A (Ed) Program for Off Campus Programs, Central Michigan University. He can be contacted at: David.Lloyd@cmich.edu