The Effectiveness of Instructor Personalized and Formative Feedback Provided by Instructor in an Online Setting: Some Unresolved Issues

Formative feedback has great potential for teaching and learning in online undergraduate programmes. There is a large number of courses where the main source of feedback is provided by the instructor. This is particularly seen in subjects where assessments are designed based on specific activities which are the same for all students, and where the assessment is performed by the instructor, not by a peer. Additionally, in introductory or basically procedural courses, there is often a need for instructor feedback, as opposed to peer-feedback, as it demands high quality feedback both in the content and in the process in order not to mislead students. Therefore personalized feedback provided by instructor is an academic demand in the current educational models that have positioned the student at the center of the learning process. However in the present context of high student-staff ratio, it is not easy to extend the use of individual comments delivered by instructors among the academic community. This article focuses on the virtual higher education environment given its present and future potential as well as the amount of queries currently surrounding it. Literature on formative feedback in higher education has been reviewed for the period 2000 to 2014, in order to find answers as to which aspects are relevant to efficiently implement personalized feedback prepared by the teacher.Findings show that effective personalized feedback in an virtual environment requires a threedimensional analysis: from the student perspective, from the instructor one and from the media perspective (written text, video recording or audio recording) , in order to find shared aspects that contribute to the enhancement in the use of personalized feedback performed by faculty.