Feedback.camp

Feedback.camp is a feedback system for supporting (design) educators in giving prompt feedback and providing formative and summative assessment in larger courses. This project was supported by the 3TU Bachelor College Innovation Fund over three consecutive years.

We used the following movie produced by blok to introduce Feedback.camp to our target audience.

From learning analytics to a new tool

This project focused on the translation of related work in the area of feedback mechanisms for higher education into a tailored framework for feedback in the area of Industrial Design, the translation of the existing corpus of data into indicators of feedback quality and how feedback is received and further on used by students in their learning process.

Feedback.camp overview

Feedback as textual conversations

The newly developed tool structures teacher feedback into very targeted and highly focused feedback dialogues between teacher and individual students tailored to their individual learning process. The tool is described in this paper with respect to conversational aspects. (Funk & van Diggelen, 2017; van Diggelen et al., 2016; Funk & van Diggelen, 2014)

Feedback.camp

Extending Feedback.camp with rubrics

A year after the first development of Feedback.camp, we met a new challenge: supporting larger courses with textual feedback without cutting back on textual conversations. One tool for more scalable feedback are rubrics, which is essentially a large table with rows describing feedback categories and columns describing discrete levels of achievement per category. The table cells contain text that describes feedback for a given category and level. Teachers can use this tool to quickly select general feedback per category.

In 2015 we used the following movie, again produced by blok, to introduce Feedback.camp to our target audience.

We incorporated rubrics into the Feedback.camp tool with a focus on quick and easy operation, so teacher could use the rubrics first to give general feedback in a transparent way, then add more specific feedback to address individual issues.

What happened to Feedback.camp in the end

Initially, we had big plans to roll out the tool across Industrial Design education and also in several other departments as well as in teacher training. So we wrote: “In the future, the tool will be used actively in Industrial Design education, also with the purpose of further investigating how the quality of written feedback evolves and redesigning educational processes around feedback tools.”

Feedback.camp

This is not entirely what happened. Within a year from launching the tool with a larger group of staff and educators, the university introduced a general learning management system (LMS). This new system promised powerful integration (did not happen for years) and was mandatory to use. Advocating for yet another tool, although better tuned to giving feedback, was not feasible and the project stopped.

The software might be in a good shape to be released as open-source. If you are interested in this, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Publications

Funk, M., & van Diggelen, M. R. (2017). Feedback conversations: creating feedback dialogues with a new textual tool for industrial design student feedback. International Journal of Web-Based Learning and Teaching Technologies, 12(4).
Abstract BibTeX Link to publication
```
@article{51ca9d82135d4731aa09fbb1101a4af7,
  title = {Feedback conversations: creating feedback dialogues with a new textual tool for industrial design student feedback},
  author = {Funk, M. and {van Diggelen}, M.R.},
  year = {2017},
  month = jul,
  doi = {10.4018/IJWLTT.2017100107},
  volume = {12},
  journal = {International Journal of Web-Based Learning and Teaching Technologies},
  issn = {1548-1107},
  publisher = {IGI Global Publishing},
  number = {4}
}
```
In this paper, the authors describe how a study of a large database of written university teacher feedback in the department of Industrial Design led to the development of a new conceptual framework for feedback and the design of a new feedback tool. This paper focuses on the translation of related work in the area of feedback mechanisms for higher education into a tailored framework for feedback in the area of Industrial Design, the translation of the existing corpus of data into indicators of feedback quality and how feedback is received and further on used by students in their learning process. The newly developed tool structures teacher feedback into very targeted and highly focused feedback dialogues between teacher and individual students tailored to their individual learning process. The tool is described in this paper with respect to conversational aspects. In the future, the tool will be used actively in Industrial Design education, also with the purpose of further investigating how the quality of written feedback evolves and redesigning educational processes around feedback tools.

van Diggelen, M. R., Morgan, C. M., Funk, M., & Bruns, M. (2016). Formative assessment: Enriching teaching and learning with formative assesment. Eindhoven University of Technology.

BibTeX

@book{83dcd2800e6148e3a408de339c68cc8c,
  title = {Formative assessment: Enriching teaching and learning with formative assesment},
  author = {{van Diggelen}, M.R. and Morgan, C.M. and Funk, M. and Bruns, M.},
  year = {2016},
  month = jan,
  isbn = {978 90 386 4027 3},
  publisher = {Eindhoven University of Technology}
}

Funk, M., & van Diggelen, M. (2014). Feeding a monster or doing good? Mining Industrial Design Student Feedback at Large. Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on Interaction Design in Educational Environments, 59.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{funk2014feeding,
  author = {Funk, Mathias and van Diggelen, Migchiel},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on Interaction Design in Educational Environments},
  citeulike-article-id = {13842983},
  organization = {ACM},
  pages = {59},
  posted-at = {2015-11-20 20:42:29},
  priority = {0},
  title = {Feeding a monster or doing good? Mining Industrial Design Student Feedback at Large},
  year = {2014}
}