e-Learning Ecologies MOOC’s Updates

Formative feedback - a necessary trend

It seems a consensus the great difference of feedback as part of the digital world is the fact that we can get feedback from multiple sources and perspectives, and that increases learning possibilities. In other words, the more the better since feedback is a fundamental aspect in education. If no feedback in online learning is provided, then I believe the first consequence would be some kind of loss of interest on the part of the learner. The videos posted this week were certainly insightful. And they did introduce some new concepts to me, especially the idea of recursive feedback. It seems to me that feedback/assessment has been a problem in education for many years but focusing on assessment for learning (formative) instead of assessment of learning (summative) is definitely a necessary step towards a new learning paradigm. Thinking of an example, I believe the way the case study has been set up here in this course in Coursera and Scholar is a good example of crowdsourcing and constitutive feedback, since the idea is that participants submit their drafts, which will be appreciated by other peers in different moments. Therefore, the whole process keeps changing and the learner keeps improving due to multiple feedback prior to the submission of the final version. This takes place, as Dr. Cope points out, due to the fact that new media has the potential to provide a dialogical architecture going on everywhere, since new media provides users with a chance to comment on the same topic at the same time. Thus, there are multiple voices interacting and building up knowledge based on different perspectives. This reality can definitely change the nature of classroom discourse, and therefore of learning, since the model of Socratic dialogue takes place in a much more intensive environment where everybody's engaged. Finally, it makes much more sense to assess students' work in terms of artefacts created - comments, post, case study, etc., than by using a test which most of the times evaluate students by providing summative assessment, counting on students' ability to memorize.