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You can adapt this resource to meet your own needs eg by editing the criteria or moving them around where they are too advanced or too basic for your particular learners. Select remake to create your own copy of the padlet that you can edit.

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Find out more about inclusive assessment

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Find out more about feedback and feed forward

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Why is feedback and feed forward important?

"Conventionally, feedback is conceptualised as an issue of 'correction of errors' or 'knowledge of results'. Much more important is how the provision of feedback affects student learning behaviour - how feedback results in students taking action that involves, or does not involve, further learning."
Transforming the Experience of Students through Assessment (TESTA)

Feedback provides information to learners about where they are in relation to their learning goals so that they can evaluate their progress, identify gaps or misconceptions in their understanding and take remedial action. Generated by tutors, peers, mentors, supervisors, a computer, or as a result of self-assessment, feedback is a vital component of effective learning.

Feedback should be constructive, specific, honest and supportive.

While feedback focuses on a student's current performance, and may simply justify the grade awarded, feed forward looks ahead to subsequent assignments and offers constructive guidance on how to do better. A combination of both feedback and feed forward helps ensure that assessment has a developmental impact on learning.

Effective feedback should also stimulate action on the part of the student. The most effective practice treats feedback as an ongoing dialogue and a process rather than a product.

What are the common problems?

Timeliness

Feed forward can only be effective if it's timely ie, received at a point when meaningful action can be taken. High-stakes assessments are often set towards the end of a module, term or semester, reducing opportunities for students to apply any feedback they receive.

Regularity

Feedback needs to be quite regular and hence on relatively small chunks of course content to be useful. One piece of detailed feedback on an extended essay or design task after ten weeks of study is unlikely to support learning across a whole course very well.

Approaches to feedback

Academic staff can often ignore the need to discuss feedback approaches. The feedback given can then be inconsistent or weak in other ways ie, skewed towards a particular type of observation (such as praise) or short term and too focused on the assignment in hand rather than truly developmental.

A common Ofsted report observation in failing colleges is that tutors (and workplace assessors in the case of apprentices) don't provide feedback to students that helps them understand how they can improve.

Missed opportunities

Students often don't collect or read feedback. This is sometimes because it arrives too late to be useful. In some cases the problem is as simple as the students not realising the feedback is available.

Alternatively students can focus on the overall mark and not understand the benefits of making use of the feedback. We discuss this further in the section on returning marks and feedback where we suggest that disaggregating marks and feedback can encourage students to engage better with the feedback.

Passive learners

Students can often be passive recipients of feedback, viewing it as the tutor's role to deliver feedback to them, rather than understanding the need for them to engage in meaningful dialogue around the feedback to aid their development.

Lack of overview

It can often be difficult for both students and tutors (especially tutors with a pastoral or personal tutoring role) to gain an overview of feedback. This may be because feedback is online but stored at a module level or because it is in a more ephemeral format such as paper or verbal feedback.

Understanding feedback

Feedback that appears self-evident to tutors may be difficult for students to understand. There could be difficulties with the format eg, indecipherable hand writing or with how the feedback is expressed and contextualised.

The Open University asked a group of students to work through their feedback talking out loud about what they understood and what they didn't understand.

How might we use technology and what are the benefits?

Technology can :

Improve clarity about marking and feedback deadlines and provide students with a personalised schedule

Help students store and access feedback easily if it's provided in a digital format

Support individual learners or subjects where certain digital formats are more suitable eg, audio feedback for language courses

Help teachers make efficiency gains by using a feedback format that best suits them eg, a slow typist may provide better quality feedback by making an audio recording.

How does feedback and feed forward relate to the lifecycle?

This theme runs right through the lifecycle:

At the specifying stage think about your approach to feedback

During the setting stage ensure that the overall submission and marking schedules allow for timely feedback that can inform the next assignment. Infom students on how to make use of feedback and also provide formative opportunities

At the marking and production stage generate feedback for students

When returning marks and feedback adopt an approach that is most likely engage students

At the reflecting stage engage in dialogue with students about their feedback and reflect on the feedback you have given, how useful it's been and any changes you should make in the future.

What resources can help?

Our feedback and feed forward guide is a good starting point on the use of technology to support student progression. You can also look at these individual resources from the guide:

Our case study outlines the use of technology to improve feedback dialogue at the University of Dundee

Our video explores reconceptualising feedback:

Further useful resources

"Neglecting dialogue can lead to dissatisfaction with feedback. The transmission model of feedback ignores these factors and importantly the role of the student in learning from the feedback. Simply providing feedback does not ensure that students read it, understand it, or use it to promote learning."

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Why is feedback and feed forward important?"Conventionally, feedback is conceptualised as an issue of 'correction of errors' or 'knowledge of results'.

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Find out more about open badges

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The use of Open Badges is growing worldwide.

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Find out how Goole College is approaching employability with virtual welding and its employability passport

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See how Abingdon and Witney College is using LinkedIn to improve employability

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Link into your professional network

LEAD ORGANISATION
Abingdon & Witney College
OVERVIEW

This project focused on helping teachers to build confidence in their own technical and professional networking skills, showing teachers how to use and become proficient with LinkedIn and how to transfer those skills to students.

Use the interactive final report to learn how staff were supported to develop their skills and to use them with 60 students to create over 3000 new Linkedin connections, 10 work experience placements, 7 new guest employer lectures and 2 job offers.
Final report
USE THESE RESOURCES TO LEARN HOW TO...

Explain why having a Linkedin profile is important to students;

Create CPD events about professional profiles for staff, students and employers;

Use and tailor your own Linkedin profile template;

Develop professional contacts with employers;

Support students to make professional links for work experience and employment opportunities that better matches their skills and aspirations.

The Project Lead provides an overview of the project
"Both colleges are planning to embed the training into our core skills programmes for staff and students so that it becomes business as usual and part of every student's and lecturer's learning."
Assistant Principal, Abingdon & Witney College
DOWNLOAD SOURCE FILES

If you have access to Moodle, you can tailor the course to your own needs by restoring the backup file into your own installation.
Moodle course backup file

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Link into your professional network LEAD ORGANISATION Abingdon & Witney College OVERVIEW This project focused on helping teachers to build confidence in their own technical and professional networking skills, showing teachers how to use and become proficient with LinkedIn and how to transfer those skills to students.

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Jisc tips on adding variety without adding barriers

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It's great to use a variety of resources and media types with learners, adding value to the learning experience. However sometimes value added to one user is subtracted from another. Here's how to minimise barriers when working with a range of media.
Documents

Structuring a document appropriately is one of the most fundamental accessibility practices. By using heading styles (instead of formatting menus), the meaning of the content becomes much more obvious. Microsoft Word's Document map/Navigation pane view is a classic example of the benefits of a well-structured document. Users can browse by different heading levels and immediately jump to any section in a long document.

Adding alternative text to images within documents ensures that people who rely on screen reading software are not disadvantaged.

See Jisc guidance on making documents, spreadsheets and presentations more accessible

Web pages

Being "born digital", many web pages are reasonably accessible by nature Web browsers allow readers to zoom and magnify. Browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla FireFox can be extended with free plugins to turn text to speech, or change colours, remove distracting information on the web page, even helping with navigation. See the training guide on useful browser plugins.

Audio

Audio is quick, cheap and easy to create. The majority of mobile devices can play audio files. There is very wide support for the MP3 format. Audio can be a preferred medium for users with different types of disabilities although it may create barriers for those with hearing impairments so please ensure the key learning objectives are available in a linked text file. This practice benefits all users (making it easy to search, copy/paste to notes or check spellings of key names). Audio suits multi-tasking; learning you can do whilst driving, jogging or working out at the gym.

Digital text can be turned into audio using text-to-speech tools. Text to speech is built into some mainstream tools like Microsoft Office (2010 upwards) and Acrobat Reader. It is available for browser plugins for Google Chrome and Mozilla FireFox. There are free stand-alone audio tools that can either read directly from the page or save as MP3 files.

Visual - images

Images can be used in many ways. Whether it is a well-prepared diagram to support a dyslexic person, or simple symbols to support users with learning difficulties, visual media provide significant benefits. Mobile devices, which most people have access to are ideal for storing and reviewing and creating visual materials in the form of photographs and video. Alternatively, copyright cleared images are easy to source from a range of collections including Pixabay, Flickr CC and Wikimedia Commons.

The accessibility of an image depends on technical factors (brightness, contrast, sharpness) as well as pedagogical factors (how effectively it is labelled, how well it is described, how it is integrated into a text/audio narrative). Summarise the key teaching points in captions, body text or alt tags so that barriers are minimised and benefits maximised.

Multimedia

Videos can stimulate discussion, clarify explanations or allow learners to record their skills and abilities. Free tools and services such as Screencast-o-matic, TinyTake or Jing can help tutors/learners turn still images into narrated movie clips. If you have PowerPoint 2013 or above it has an automatic screen recording tool under the Insert options. Apps for tablet devices (e.g. EduCreations, Book Creator, ThingLink, Explain Everything) make it easy to create multimedia content with embedded video/images and raw videos can be taken on most smartphones. See this example of a learner using Educreations.

As with images and audio, a text summary of the key teaching points adds value for everyone and is an essential minimum for accessibility.

Interactivity

Creating rich media and interactivity is no longer a specialist job requiring expensive training and tools. Free content creation tools such as Xerte toolkits and eXeLearning as well as a range of websites and phone/tablet apps such a Showbie allow staff or students to create sophisticated interactivities including quizzes with instant feedback. However, the more sophisticated a learning experience becomes, the greater the potential for accidentally introducing barriers.

Some interactivities add a lot of value to one kind of learner but prove to be a barrier for another - for example dragging and dropping slope labels onto a contour map will be a fun revision tool for many learners but a barrier for a blind person. You could adapt the coding to make it technically accessible but the resulting activity would require immense concentration and memory for a blind user - not at all a 'fun, revision tool'. In circumstances like this it is important to get the balance right. It can be appropriate to have "partially accessible" resources on the network if they benefit many learners so long as an alternative resource (in this case perhaps a tactile alternative) is available. However, it makes little sense to waste the time of the developer and the blind student in making an inappropriate learning experience 'easier to access' if it is still an inappropriate activity.

Be creative and collaborative

Accessibility is as much related to the pedagogical approach as it is to the nature of the resource. Being creative about different types of reasonable adjustment will allow you more freedom to be innovative with both the online and the offline experiences. Working with rather than for disabled users will often help uncover simple solutions.

Share and Enjoy

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Adding variety without adding barriers - Accessible Organisations

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It's great to use a variety of resources and media types with learners, adding value to the learning experience. However sometimes value added to one user is subtracted from another. Here's how to minimise barriers when working with a range of media. Documents Structuring a document appropriately is one of the most fundamental accessibility practices.

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Trainers and apprentices at Brockenhurst College discuss how electronic feedback improves dialogue and makes them more efficient

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Brockenhurst College Case Study - Assessors, learners, IQA's talk about their use of the Smart Assessor E-portfolio software.

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Find out how plumbing apprentices use Facebook groups for peer learning at city of Plymouth College

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This article describes how social media pedagogies create meaningful provision and an opportunity space for the emergence of 'apprentice as subject'.

Bruner (1960) advocated meaningful curricula, asserting that if prior learning was going to make subsequent learning easier, then it had to provide students with a general picture of the ways in which different subject matter relate to one another and unless detail is placed into a structured pattern, it is rapidly forgotten. My study found that classroom plumbing teaching rarely related to what students did in the practical sessions or at work, meaning it was diminishing classroom motivation. I also found that apprentices were more engaged and productive in the workplace than in college, suggesting the plumbing curriculum was more meaningful to apprentices in workplaces, where knowledge was 'presented' first-hand. Most students regard theory lessons as a means of passing tests, and few see classroom theory as important to job performance or productivity.

Facebook Pedagogy harnesses mobile technologies as networks of apprentices and college staff, including training-provider officers, assessors, plumbing tutors, managers and college directors. It relates apprentices' work experiences to the classroom as compatible with e-portfolios. Apprentices respond to the initiative posting pictures and experiences of practical work, and of poorly installed plumbing systems, which are often impossible to replicate in classroom contexts:

A growing library of real-life plumbing scenarios helps contextualise the curriculum with real case studies that assist students in identifying and understanding the technical plumbing components, systems and occupational processes and principles involved. Some systems shared by apprentices are old-fashioned and corroded, often very different to the new types of systems taught in college. Photos show unpredictable boiler problems, stimulating discussion between apprentices in class and improving technical knowledge and problem-solving approaches.

While simple faults can be simulated in college, it is impossible to predict specific boiler faults and plumbing problems in the uncertain context of the workplace.

When a boiler fault that is difficult to diagnose occurs, and the apprentice investigates and shares pictures on Facebook, the space of the possible is enlarged. Facebook Pedagogy creates a type of knowledge in real time, which is 'emergentist' and different to the prescribed 'represented epistemology' found in most types of college learning. Facebook Pedagogy enables apprentices' to participate in technical discussions and present ongoing elements of their work, not normally covered in the college curriculum.

The Venn diagram below shows how Facebook can explain the socialising of an apprentice (object) into a professional plumber, while distinguishing this from educating an apprentice by creating a space for their emergence as a subject human being.

Biesta's first function of education is 'qualification', which is about the complex and rich experience of becoming qualified to do things that involve knowledge, action (skills and attitude) and judgement (values). However, some skills and knowledge taught in the college context may simply be 'representative' of the real world compared with knowledge 'presented' first-hand at work (Osberg et al, 2008).

The second function of education is described by Biesta (2009) as 'socialisation', or the way in which 'object' individuals are socialised into existing ways of being. Apprentices are legitimised on the peripheries of practice by other workers, and their apprenticeship journeys are directed towards the centre of practice. Thus, apprentices are being socialised as 'objects' into a 'professional identity', or an existing way of being (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Biesta, 2009). Although socialisation is certainly an appropriate aim of technical education, education is not just about producing unquestioning 'objects'. Therefore, Biesta (2009: 356) argues that education must mean something other than socialisation:

It is not about the insertion of 'newcomers' into existing orders, but about ways of being that hint at independence from such orders

Finally, subjectification involves the emergence of the 'subject' apprentice, who has the space to respond by taking pictures at work, posting pictures on Facebook and asking questions in college, while engaged in industry, promoting real-world motivation, collaboration and problem-solving.

Dr Simon Reddy is a master plumber, plumbing teacher, researcher and Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Plumbing and Heating Engineering @reddyplumbing

If you enjoyed reading this article we invite you to join the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) as an individual member, and to encourage your own organisation to join ALT as an organisational or sponsoring member
References:
Biesta, G.J.J. (2009) 'On the weakness of education', Philosophy of Education Yearbook, pp. 354-362.

Bruner, J. (1960) The process of education, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Osberg, D., Biesta, G. and Cilliers, P. (2008) 'From representation to Emergence: Complexity's challenge to the epistemology of schooling', Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 40, no.1, pp. 213-227.

Reddy, S. (2014) 'A study of tutors' and students' perceptions and experiences of full-time College Courses and apprenticeships in plumbing', University of Exeter PhD thesis, [Online], Available: https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/15728

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Facebook Pedagogy and Education in Apprenticeships

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This article describes how social media pedagogies create meaningful provision and an opportunity space for the emergence of 'apprentice as subject'. Bruner (1960) advocated meaningful curricula, asserting that if prior learning was going to make subsequent learning easier, then it had to provide students with a general picture of the ways in which different subject matter relate to one another and unless detail is placed into a structured pattern, it is rapidly forgotten.

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Read how the City of Glasgow College  enhanced apprentice learning through feedback

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Find out more about technology for employability in FE and skills

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Find out how flipped learning can help meet individual needs and develop independence

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See how the University of Wolverhampton is using E portfolios in work-based learning

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JISC - Stories of e-Portfolio Implementation - University of Wolverhampton

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At the University of Wolverhampton, tutors are pioneering new directions for e-portfolios using the personal learning space -- Pebble Pad. Use of PebblePad is supported by a central Institute for Learning Enhancement. Staff at the Institute were initially looking for an alternative to paper-based portfolios in personal development planning.

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Learning Wheels can be contextualised for particular vocational areas

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PETA Ltd developed video learning ‘hotspots’ within engineering workshops for apprentices, to encourage independent learning and reduce waiting time for support

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Video learning for engineering apprentices

LEAD ORGANISATION
PETA Limited
OVERVIEW

This project supported engineering instructors to develop their confidence and competence using tablets devices, video editing, mobile learning pedagogies, and tools including Quick Response (QR) codes and augmented reality software within an engineering training workshop.

Read the final report to learn how apprentices benefitted as staff used their increased confidence to create technology-based learning resources.
Final report
USE THESE RESOURCES TO LEARN HOW TO...

Create and edit videos using YouTube;

Create interactive online assessment tools;

Create QR Codes and Augmented Reality resources;

Create and use Moodle Lessons;

Create and use engineering specific learning resources.

The Project Lead describes how staff skills have improved.

"I've learnt a great deal using digital technology to improve learners' experience. I've had fun learning new skills and developing them."
Engineering Instructor, PETA Limited
GETTING STARTED

Use the session plan from Workshop 1 to explore how you might develop and deliver a session to support staff create videos for learning.

Gavin Smith
Senior Manager
PETA Limited
Telephone: 023 9253 8700
Email: GSmith@peta.co.uk

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Video learning for engineering apprentices LEAD ORGANISATION PETA Limited OVERVIEW This project supported engineering instructors to develop their confidence and competence using tablets devices, video editing, mobile learning pedagogies, and tools including Quick Response (QR) codes and augmented reality software within an engineering training workshop.

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Your Passport using open badges at Loughborough College

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Uploaded by LearningTechLoucoll on 2015-11-04.

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At the end of their course all learners have digital literacy skills appropriate to their level of study and vocational context

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Digital tools are used to simulate authentic work environments and situations for assessment purposes

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Learners are assessed on digital skills and capabilities and wider employability skills as well as their ability to use specific tools

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Vocational relevance is built into assessment

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Promote learner employability (or self-employment)

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All staff, learners and employers (where relevant) have access to the single source of online data about learner progress

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All staff and learners have access to a single source of online data recording learner progress against all assessment criteria

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Learners have online access to a record of their own progress

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Teaching staff have access to an online record of learner progress

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Track progress in order to offer appropriate support

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Learners are able to set their own goals and measure progress towards them

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Learners are well able to monitor their own progress

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Learners are encouraged to develop good study habits and provided with tools to help

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Learning tasks are designed to motivate learners and show early evidence of progress

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Develop independent learners

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Learners actively reflect on their feedback

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Learners and staff participate in dialogue about feedback

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Feedback is used to improve future performance

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Feedback is prompt, constructive and supportive, identifying achievements as well as failings

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Ensure feedback leads to improvement

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Where possible learners are offered the opportunity to negotiate aspects of the timing, topic and format of assessed work

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Learners have considerable flexibility in selecting topics for assessment as well as the tools used to provide evidence

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Information about requirements and standards is provided in a way that is accessible to all learners

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Learners understand how well they meet criteria and what they need to do to improve

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Learners are involved in activities to establish their understanding of learning outcomes and grading criteria or performance standards

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Tutor centric                                                                                                                                                           Learner centric

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Tutor centric                                                                                                                                                           Learner centric

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Support the personalised needs and preferences of learners

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Help all learners understand the requirements and standards for each set task

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All assessment is designed with accessibility and inclusivity in mind but we often have to make adjustments

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Learners are able to make appropriate judgements (whether professional or academic) based on criteria

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Flexibility in providing evidence of achievement and receiving feedback in a variety of formats is available to all learners