Electronic Feedback: Pedagogical Considerations for the Implementation of Software

As university lecturers, we often struggle to provide our students with good quality feedback in a consistent manner. This is usually caused by the increasing imbalance in teacher-student ratios (Hounsell et al., 2008), as well as the pressure of academic life and the lack of time (Sadler, 2010). In addition, assessment practices should be transparent enough to ensure all students are evaluated in a similar way (O’Donovan et al., 2004), especially when different instructors teach different groups of students taking the same course. This paper, which focuses on designing a feedback scheme that helps instructors to provide good quality feedback in a consistent manner, begins with a needs analysis based on the author’s experience as an instructor of academic writing in English. A literature review follows, focusing on: (a) the scholarship on feedback in higher education; and (b) the research on the use of technology for the provision of feedback. Finally, a feedback scheme is presented, and some guidelines for its implementation are provided.