Learning Across Sites: New tools, infrastructures and practices - Earli

For EARLI members only.
Not for onward distribution.
Productive e- feedback in higher education 251
repetitive nature of the teaching–learning sequences week after week for three
years. The consequence may be less discussion, perfunctory peer comments and
more free- riders, all aspects mentioned by students in the interviews. Second, the
empirical material shows that teacher’s and TA’s textual comments are interpreted
and treated as ‘authoritative’ in Bakhtin’s sense. Even though the group discussions
provide opportunities for dialogue, doubt and resistance, the word of the
teacher or TA has social authority. There is evidence that students take the oral or
written comments just as corrections and then just try to align their text and ‘make
it right’. Textual comments, as any authority’s word needs to be questioned or
even resisted, according to Bakhtin, in order to become productive and internally
persuasive. Third, some students report that they do not take part in discussions
because they are afraid of giving wrong answers and appearing ignorant. These are,
in our view, indications of a learning culture where the authoritative word prevails
and where there is not enough space for disagreements, conflicts and diverging
views. There may be different reasons for this, for instance that law is a discipline
where there is a large body of authoritative texts that cannot be ignored by future
lawyers. On the other hand students know they need to develop interpretative and
argumentative skills, and it could be expected that they would welcome the dialogic
spaces to develop critical and independent thinking. Another explanation is that
the TAs, who lack experience, may be more authoritative than professors would
have been in their feedback. Our point here is not to make any final judgement,
but to show the complexity one has to deal with when designing a ‘productive’
e- feedback system.
Education: fostering productive learning through
divergent voices and disagreement
The web- based Master of Philosophy in Education programme is also strictly
structured, but here, the students receive assignments every second or third week.
Except for an annual face- to- face seminar, all communication in this study programme
is web- based, also the feedback. Anchored in problems from their own
practice, the students discuss practice- related problem statements in light of educational
theory. Based on the fundamental sociocultural idea that students should
be active participants in their own learning process, the focus for this group of
students is therefore on their own and fellow students’ texts. Through a meticulously
structured system of assignments and e- feedback procedures they learn to
improve their text. The students first answer the assignments in collaboration with
fellow students before later receiving feedback from the supervisor. For the work
not to become too trivial, the procedure is changed for every assignment. The
supervisor may give traditional individual feedback or focus on the group’s product
and even on the peer students’ previous peer- feedback. There are, however, also
some stable elements in each new assignment, in order to assure a certain degree
of predictability and thereby reduce the level of stress