Learning Management System:
Providing timely personalized feedback
It is important for students to know how well they are doing as they learn. A common mistake is to associate this needed feedback with a grade, overlooking the power and value of written or verbal comments to students about their learning and thinking. Providing students with these types of positive, critical, and open-ended comments gives them a sense of achievement which motivates them to learn more. One of the best strategies to improve student achievement is for teachers to actively monitor students’ learning and provide such feedback. This feedback can be given to individual students, to specific groups, or to the whole class depending upon the nature of the learning task.
Critical to maximizing the potential impact that feedback can have on student learning is its immediacy and value. The longer the time gap between the completion of a learning task and its feedback, the less effective the feedback becomes. Feedback should also be given to students as frequently as possible. Research shows that metacognition, having students think about their thinking, has the single greatest impact on student achievement. Insightful and valuable teacher feedback that causes students to examine their thinking should the goal of teacher feedback to students.
The LMS plays a critical role in providing timely, personalized, and insightful feedback to students in the following ways:
- The LMS provides the avenue for real-time student collaboration and discussion. Teachers can actively monitor student thinking and provide early intervention and re-direction in a very proactive manner.
- The LMS allows students to submit assignments, quizzes, tests, and projects online. Once submitted, teachers have immediate access and can provide feedback.
- The LMS contains built in features and tools that allow teachers annotate, highlight, write comments on student work and return to the students online. In addition, teachers can take advantage of the feature that allows teachers to provide a recording of oral feedback to students and attach it the student’s work.
Without the use of a LMS, providing timely feedback to students is a challenging and time consuming process. The LMS provides the opportunity for technology to provide such feedback in a more effective and efficient manner.