Effective feedback design using free technologies

Feedback plays a critical role in student learning and performance. However, providing students with effective feedback is challenging in online environments because of physical separation between students and instructors. Technologies can be used to enhance the effectiveness of feedback in online courses. In this article, we propose effective feedback design for online students using freely available technologies. We first review literature on the attributes of feedback that impact its effectiveness. Then, to address such attributes, we propose effective feedback design using three types of free technologies - media sharing, collaborative, and screencasting technologies. For each type of technology, we focus on one representative technology such as VoiceThread for a media sharing tool, a wiki for a collaborative tool, and Jing for a screencasting tool. Based on the analysis of empirical studies using such technologies, effective feedback design was constructed to maximize the affordances of each technology that foster feedback dialogues, help to bring feedback from multiple sources, and encourage students to follow up with feedback.