Effective Provision of Formative Feedback in an e-Learning Environment

Formative feedback is a vital part of education. It can be effective in promoting learning if it is timely, personal, manageable, motivational, and in direct relation with assessment criteria. However, despite its importance, research suggests that a number of students do not value feedback primarily for reasons that relate to lack of motivation and difficulty in interpretation of the feedback comments. In this paper we present an e-learning environment that effectively supports the provision of formative feedback. Our aims are to enhance feedback reception and strengthen the quality of feedback through the method that it is communicated to the students. We suggest that an effective feedback communication method should integrate and facilitate a number of quality attributes in order to ensure that students engage with the feedback contents. We believe that the developed system successfully addressed the issues of student engagement and motivation and achieved its objectives. The results of using the system for two years indicate a positive perception of the students which, in turn, encourage us to further explore its effectiveness by integrating it into a an open source learning management system.