PROVIDING FEEDBACK ON STUDENT WORK IN DISTANCE EDUCATION IN TURKEY: Practices and Recommendations

In distance education, providing feedback on student work has a key role in facilitating learning and teacher- student dialogue. This article examines the distance learning context and providing feedback in this great but challenging system. It draws on the experiences of 200 distance learners enrolled in different programs in the Open Education Faculty at Anadolu University in Turkey. Its purpose is to find out whether distance students are provided any feedback by their faculty, whether they think that feedback provision is beneficial in distance learning process, and lastly whether they would like their faculty to provide them with some feedback. The survey is based on a questionnaire including three questions to which distance learners can respond briefly as yes or no and, if desired, they can expand their ideas with their own sentences. The results of the study suggest that distance learners are , on the whole, provided no feedback. Of 200 DL, 180 % of them regard feedback provision as a beneficial part of their distance learning process and want to have some feedback mechanisms in their faculty, yet 20% of the learners think just the opposite by saying that it is not something beneficial and they do not need it. In the conclusion part, considering the high proportion in demand of feedback provision, certain feedback mechanisms will be introduced to make the distance learning process more appealing, encouraging, and fruitful for distance learners.