Designing rich feedback encounters

Abstract

Feedback is a cornerstone of effective learning, yet it remains one of the most persistently complex challenges in higher education, for educators and students alike. This workshop introduces current thinking about student-centred feedback practices, and then explores the implications for how we can design valuable (and sustainable) feedback encounters across the course and through technologies. 

The workshop has four broad sections:

1. Understanding feedback: This section briefly explains current thinking about feedback as a student-centred process. It introduces concepts of evaluative judgment, and feedback literacy. Building off these concepts we begin to identify a series of heuristics for our feedback designs.
2. Designing for a feedback-rich course: Using research-informed design heuristics, educators and learning designers will work collaboratively to audit and reshape their own courses to support a feedback-rich experience, one that builds student agency, feeds forward, and fosters continuous engagement. Along the way we will tackle questions such as how we can build early and frequent feedback encounters, and explore examples of impactful exemplar strategies, AI formative feedback, and peer feedback. 
3. Sustainable feedback delivery: This section of the workshop narrows to the practice of teacher-delivery of feedback. The provision of feedback by teachers is a time consuming, effortful and emotional task. This workshop draws on a decade of research into audio, video, and screencast-based feedback and will offer explicit guidance on how to create these rich feedback artefacts, and how to do it efficiently. Through hands-on activities, participants will create their own multimedia feedback artefacts, testing sustainable workflows and content principles.
4. Debating the role of AI in feedback: The workshop will close with a discussion of the emerging possibilities of AI feedback agents. While these rapidly evolving tools raise exciting possibilities for scalability and responsiveness, they also invite critical reflection. Participants will be introduced to some examples of AI-generated feedback practices and debate its strengths and limitations to those of human-mediated responses.

By the end of this workshop, participants will have:

• Applied feedback theory to design a feedback-rich course tailored to their own teaching context;
• Produced audio, video, or screencast feedback artefacts testing sustainable workflows and research-based principles;
• Debated the potential and limitations of AI-generated feedback.

This workshop is designed for educators, learning designers, and researchers seeking practical, research-informed, and critically reflective approaches to enhancing feedback practices through digital tools.