Online Portfolio Feedback Techniques

I started my career as an online educator.

I am convinced that while the online environment is inherently different than a face-to-face classroom, there is still the opportunity to engage students deeply with the content and the instructor.

As a portfolio mentor, the process of providing written feedback on student portfolio sites was tedious. Students had trouble following and implementing my suggestions because it wasn’t easy to translate words in the LMS to targeted action in their projects.

Essentially they could not “see” what I was writing about.

As a solution, I started recording my feedback to students using screen capture software. I would pull up their site on screen to be able to give them a visual reference for my comments. Students were able to see the exact part of their portfolio site I was addressing.

In order to help build community and social learning opportunities in my online classroom, I started to record and share feedback for all portfolio sites in a single video. This way students would have the opportunity to see and learn from each other’s work. This type of formative assessment was extremely effective when students were asked to revise and resubmit their projects at the close of the course.

From an administrative standpoint, this practice reduced my grading time significantly. While grades are never discussed/issued in the communal recording, the process of providing batch feedback allows me to keep my comments in the LMS to a minimum, while directing students to the individualized feedback in the video.

This practice is the sweet spot of efficient AND effective feedback.

Thanks to Full Sail for featuring my work in this video!