Improving Quality of Feedback Using a Technology-Supported Learning System

Feedback is a crucial element in the learning process and it can be quite challenging to provide the right feedback upon which students can act upon to improve their learning. Providing proper feedback is even more challenging in contemporary educational environments due the presence of a number of factors such as: changing expectations of students, variety of teaching modes, etc. Our objective in this study is to develop a scalable technology-enhanced learning approach that provides quality and actionable feedback to students which they can use it to improve their learning. We provide a detailed explanation of the pedagogical foundations of our approach as well as the design and implementation of the technological supporting system. 142 students across three undergraduate ISrelated courses were exposed to the new learning approach over a period of 12 weeks. The outcome of this was then evaluated using a retrospective pre-test on several dimensions of feedback. In this paper, we only report the findings related to the quality of feedback. The data is then analyzed using descriptive statistics and the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test. Results showed that the approach was promising as students found the feedback to be relevant, adequate, timely and generally better than in other courses.