Providing Fruitful Feedback
Timely and constructive feedback is an essential part of maintaining a strong instructor presence in your course. In the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (IPP), feedback is tied directly to Evaluation. The IPP tells us that crucial to learning success is our ability as faculty to provide fruitful feedback to students that calls upon what they have done well and what they still need to improve upon. Below are some tips for how to speed that process up while also ensuring students have a great chance for success.
Add Your Voice to Feedback
A lesser known feature of the canvas SpeedGrader is the ability for faculty to provide audio or video feedback as an alternative to writing. This is a great way to add strong instructor presence, allowing you to provide intimate feedback to your students with your own voice. This is an especially great option for lower stakes assignments that don’t require a lot of line-by-line feedback.
How: Read the guide on how to leave audio or video feedback Links to an external site. for student assignment submissions.
Peer Meets Peer
Allowing students to dive deep into the work created by their peers is a great strategy for getting your students to connect and grow. Canvas can make this process fully automatic or manual depending on your preference. Successful and constructive peer review requires regular reminders and framing from faculty. Faculty also frequently report being burned out from having to peer review the peer reviewer, so it’s not advisable to use for every assignment. Pair-and-share is an alternative and less formal approach to Canvas peer review and is a great way to get students to connect with each other in a less formal setting.
How: If you plan to implement formal and informal peer review in your course, be sure to check out the Canvas guide on peer review Links to an external site.. Want further reading? Check out "Peer Review Done Right Links to an external site." from Edutopia.
Create Clear Expectations and Rubrics
Student success and trust are both heavily tied to how faculty convey their expectations to students around assignments and grading. Using a rubric to clearly outline assignment requirements before the work begins will allow students to start heading in the right direction. Similarly, those same rubrics can be used for faculty grading in the Canvas SpeedGrader after the work has been turned in.
How: Check out the Canvas guide to Rubrics and check out our page on Authentic Assessment to import some already built rubrics to your assignments.
Get Their Feedback Too
Traditionally we think about feedback as something that comes from faculty to students, or student to student in peer review. However, it's equally as important to regularly collect feedback from students. Faculty have found success in having a short check-in survey they send out every few weeks to students. Others have also scheduled one-on-one or small group Zoom sessions to give students to talk specifically about how things are going so far.
How: Create a Canvas survey Links to an external site. or an anonymous Survey Monkey Links to an external site. survey. Need help coming up with questions? Check out "How to Check-In With Students Links to an external site." Also, check out this informal "How's it Going?" survey that Bill O'Connell embedded in his second week. He created it with Qualtrics, (available through SU) which has a funny smiley face slider: