Journal review i wanted to remember

Finding Opportunities for Unique Online Interaction for Writing Students



My key interest in studying educational technology is to find clues and keys for ideas that I can translate into my own developmental writing classroom. I was intrigued by the idea that I found in Mary McVey’s article in the International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, titled “Writing in an Online Environment: Student Views of “Inked” Feedback.” It was the inked feedback that first sparked my interest. I have strong memories of reading through professor’s reviews of my writing assignments and having those handwritten comments, directly beside and intertwined with my text, was an excellent learning tool.

McVey’s research reviewed the challenges that arise when technology takes the place of the traditional pen-in-hand response from an instructor. The study focused on a format for providing effective and useful feedback specifically on writing for students in an online course. Students in a child development course had the opportunity to have their instructor’s offer feedback through a template that complies with a standard writing rubric, along with the additional component of hand-written comments through the inking feature of a Tablet PC.

The article includes a quick, but thorough review of studies that link the role of effective feedback in the learning process. The studies that McVey noted highlighted the need for immediate feedback that offers ideas and suggestions students can use to improve in their next performance. The McVey’s research also addressed one of my biggest concerns in using technology, in that the personal aspect of feedback can easily be lost. In an online environment, the e-mails, instructions, grades, etc., can be the only communication between instructor and student so building and maintaining a sense of connectedness with the “class” is especially difficult.

Students who took part in the study were given a template where they could paste their final written work. This template functioned as a rubric to outline the instructor’s expectations for the writing assignment. When students received feedback from the instructors, it was based on this template, but with the addition of the inking from the tablet students also could see what how their writing assignments had been marked up for grading. The tablet PC allowed the instructors to write, as they would with a pen on top of the document that the students submitted for grading. So the traditional arrows that show this sentence would have been better here or the question marks that highlight that a particular portion of a paper is unclear would or at least could be written all over a student’s “paper.”
Using the inking feature proved to be convenient for the instructors in that they did not have to copy and paste sections of the students papers for comment or type out long explanations indicating where problems had occurred. Students responded to the study survey, commenting that the feedback inked onto their papers “gave a more human aspect to the feedback” (McVey, 2008, p. 41). The interactive manner of the feedback also showed students that the instructors were actively reading their work, adding to the connectedness of the experience. This type of feedback also made a visual impact, which allows for a wider variety of learning styles to be accommodated.

Students also indicated that the specific feedback they received helped them identify problem areas and areas in which they were doing well. The specific feedback gave these students information they could use in their future writings. On the whole, students very well received the experiment with the main negative response from students being that on occasion the instructor’s inked feedback was difficult to read. The outstanding difficulty was the handwriting of the instructors more than all-else.

“The survey responses send a clear message. Students saw this feedback method as providing personalized contact with the instructor, and, they viewed that connection as being especially valuable in the online setting” (McVey, 2008, p. 42). As an English instructor, the written word is an integral part of how I express myself, but having studied English (or even if I had not) there is no doubt that written communication is open to interpretation in a way that personal interaction is not. There are no nonverbal cues to guide our understanding of a written passage, and it is in the interpretation of or feeling generated by feedback that the sense of connectedness between an instructor and a student could suffer.

During my second class meeting this semester I had a student ask me if I had sent a mass e-mail to the class outlining the next assignment or if I had sent each student an individual message. It was clear that he was impressed with the idea that I had responded to each student individually as they had sent a test e-mail to me. It is in this sphere of personalized contact that I see my clearest concern with educational technology that is used solely for simplifying the instructor’s workload or for any of the very valid reasons for adding technological components to a course—if these components are not carefully handled with a personal touch from the instructor.



Reference

McVey, M. (2008). Writing in an Online Environment: Student Views of "Inked" Feedback. International Journal of Teaching & Learning in Higher Education, 20(1), 39-50.