EDUCAUSE Review

Published articles include this piece on the Leveraging Feedback Experiences, published in EDUCAUSE Review on June 1st, 2020. Feedback is a powerful construct in the design of quality online learning, and quantified dimensions of learners’ feedback experiences can be leveraged to improve effectiveness, increase efficiency, and maintain appeal in online courses...

...This article began with the conundrum of measuring and monitoring online course quality. Most current practices are lag measures at best and inconsequential at worst. If it is true that a high-quality feedback experience leads to high achievement and satisfaction, and if it is also true that an online student's feedback experience can be quantified in real time using LMS data, it follows that instructional leaders and educational technology providers could create dashboards using learning analytics that would, in real time, monitor and report the dimensions of feedback as a proxy for quality online learning. Dragan Gašević, Shane Dawson, and George Siemens rightly remind us that "learning analytics are about learning," and yet the analytics in the hands of most educators today have precious little connection to actual learning.

Step into the shoes of a policy maker, philanthropist, grant maker, or an accreditor for a moment. All of them need methods to compare one online learning program with another for the purpose of granting funds or shaping policy that protects students from bad actors in the marketplace. What if the definition of a learner's feedback experience was so widely accepted that any entity could ask of an online learning provider, "Could you provide data around your learners' feedback experiences for each degree level and program? Could you also provide these data disaggregated by race/ethnicity, gender, and first-generation categorizations?" Side by side, both consumers and leaders would be able to make meaningful evaluations.