Feedback link for all elements

The web is more and more social in that the users/readers of content are more and more invited to influence the content. This is especially true for support pages that are for help people learn to do things. A couple examples: [Google "was this helpful?"]; [Microsofts ditto].

Therefore it seems very important that this feature is lacking in Moodle, especially considering its social constructivistic underpinnings. It seems natural that this should be implemented, indeed almost a glaring miss.

There is a form for collecting feedback [documentation] [download page] in Moodle which can be used for making course evaluations etc. The problem is that it is difficult to get people to spontaneusly report suggestions, critisisms etc at all. If they have to find and go to another page, formulate a description of where they came from and what they want, felt etc, there are few that will do it, and the quality of the feedback will often lack crucial details so it may be useless.

Collecting feedback in a general form at the end of a course has many lacks. The students are poorly motivated (they won't be getting any use of changes that are made). Many annoyances, suggestions will have been forgotten. Those that are remembered will be difficult to describe accurately.

Having some kind of general course feedback early in a course is a good idea and can, of course, meet the first problem.

Which Elements?

Page

The properties that would be good to include:

• No response
• General rating
• Lacking:
  • Linkage
  • Content
  • Language
    • grammar
    • spelling
• Suggestions

Here is an example of a page feedback form. The form has many of the things that I'd like to include. I would be like to have a small page with expandable fields connected to checked types. Only the first two checks are implemented in this.

Quiz questions (even lesson and feedback and questionnaire?)

This is very important. If I had to chose between Page and Question, I'd chose question feedback.

Since evaluation questions are very important to the learners, they are very motivated to see that they are clear.

This can also be a way to make students an active part of the quiz creation/improvement process. Dennis Daniels has been trying to push for this possibility. He calls it "question challenge". A possible use scenario: The teacher quickly prepares a quiz with minimal answer alternatives and makes it available to the fastest students. These are encouraged to add more answer alternatives with motivations, and react to the existing formulation, grading and feedback. The teacher reviews their feedback and easily incorporates the useful suggestions into the test before the main body of students try the quiz.

There are many possible parts that can be specific to the feedback for questions.

Is the question itself clear? This might be able to be covered by the same fields that are of interest for general feedback for pages.

Is my answer considered wrong though I feel it is right? (It would be good to include a "certainty" rating.) There should be a field for explaining how the learner got the answer. This could be the basis for the feedback field for that answer, if the teacher should chose to include that answer.

Is the feedback I get for my answer: unclear, incorrect, possible to improve?

Does the user have other answers that (s)he was tempted to try? Usually people make similar misstakes and this could be a valuable resource for giving better feedback to common mistakes and for creating good "distractors" for multiple choice questions.

Certainty Based Marking, CBM, is also a form of very valuable quiz feedback. It would be good to think about it at the same time as other quiz feedback. It is often a 3-step scale.: C1 C2 C3 where 1 is quite uncertain and 3 is very certain.

When a quiz editor receives feedback on a question it should be easy to use it to develope the question. Prepared fields may depend on the question type. "the answer I would have used", "an answer I might have used", "my motivation". The first 2 could be used to make new answer alternatives. The last as foundation for feedback for that answer.

question feedback form fields

 question/word {check} unclear

a)possible interpretation 1 b)possible interpretation 2

grade questionable (this perspective maybe the teacher should be able to choose not to ask about)

answer feedback wrong/unclear

Socialbookmarking important since what's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander! The grade goal of students varies and this can mean that a highly rated resource for one person could be useless for another. Therefore a rating should be able to be connected to information about the user. Anonymous (though visible for admin if breaking netiquette) ratings are better than none, though the value would be increased if complemented by some info like grade goal, special branch, language proficiency, disabilities, etc.

Links

[A blog post about answering tough questions] includes "Check afterwards to see if the questioner feels satisfied."