Explain Everything: What Can Students Gain From Online Multimodal Feedback?

Abstract

Feedback to students is an essential part of learning, particularly language learning. Traditional feedback on students’ writing is written on drafts and/or conveyed via face-to-face consultations. However, with increased workload and class sizes, some problems that educators face when they use the traditional feedback methods face include the timeliness and quality of feedback, time constraints of consultations, and a lack of engagement by students (Crook et al., 2012). This study examines students’ writing performance as well as qualitative and quantitative measurements of students’ experiences with different modalities of feedback. It also highlights the benefits and drawbacks of using online resources to provide feedback to students and demonstrates how educators can best provide quality feedback to language learners in higher education. Consistent with previous research findings (Nicol & Milligan, 2006; Parr & Timperley, 2010), the results of this study suggest that using technology to provide feedback can further enhance learners’ performance by promoting deeper learning and higher order thinking, and by increasing students’ self-regulated learning.