We all know assessment and assessment feedback is a crucial aspect of any accredited programme of study. Allowing students to get feedback on their work enables them to identify not only areas for improvement but also highlights the great work students have been doing throughout the year. This, in turn, can motivate students to push themselves even further with their study.
The increasing use of technology, both within the classroom and for assessment purposes, has led to an inevitable increase in online assessment and online feedback. Over the past few years we have been lucky here at Teesside University to have a Batch Feedback Tool, built 2009, and redesigned in 2015 by one of the Learning Technologists in house. This works seamlessly with our virtual learning environment (VLE) and goes some way in helping us manage/support this increase.
The tool provides three vital functions. It allows staff to:
1. Batch download of online assignments
2. Create feedback templates
3. Batch upload of feedback in one go
As the use of feedback templates is becoming more common, the batch feedback tool can also create individualised assignment feedback sheets. By simply uploading a blank feedback template, the tool creates a downloadable copy of that template for each student for that assignment. For each student, the system will generate a unique file that is named so that the system can identify individual students automatically, saving you the hard work.
Overall, staff who use the system have said they found it to be invaluable. Now that it incorporates a drag and drop facility, it is a very intuitive workflow. We’ve found that staff who use the tool find it saves a considerable amount of time as they can upload their feedback in one go, rather than having to attach individual feedback to each student.
As different programmes have different approaches for feedback, the system has been developed to allow any feedback form to be used. This allows greater flexibility for staff, rather than forcing a single feedback form for the entire University. Experience shows that most feedback sheets have several items in common: most have space for the student name; tutor name; score/grade; detailed feedback to the student.
If you ar
e using Microsoft Word together with our Batch feedback tool for your assessment feedback you can use some of Words inbuilt functionality. For example, to place the students name directly into the document as well as getting it to total marks for you. If you’d like to use this functionality, simply follow the steps in our online help guide Assignment Feedback Sheets which will show you how to insert fields in your document that will to add students name and total marks. Then simply use the batch feedback tool to create an individual feedback sheet for each student.