Role of Feedback in a Learning Ecosystem

The importance of review quality, and the reasons for collecting feedback.

Simply asking people how happy they were at the end of a course (or any transaction) is an easy question, but not very useful, and prone to bias. Feedback systems are crucial in sharing economies, and feedback in a learning and teaching setting has its own characteristics.

Feedback in Sharing Economies

After any transaction in a sharing economy platform, reviews by both parties about each other seems to be the norm. Building up an impressive set of positive reviews will make your profile more trustworthy, allowing for larger and riskier transactions.

The quality of a review system is vital to any sharing platform. Since people trust those reviews, they must not contain unfair criticism or undue praise. To ensure reliability of reviews, all parties must have access to complete information and trustworthy reputations. Platforms should uphold the health of their ecosystems by self-regulation. Indemnifying users might also be a good move in the long run.[1]

Some strategies for culling fake reviews include a) detection algorithms, b) allowing reviews only by verified transaction parties, c) stings, and d) leveraging behavioral economics.[2]

Feedback in Learning and Education

In formal education, it’s the students who usually get feedback, in the form of an evaluation and a grade. In practice, learners will also receive feedback from their peers. We’ll discuss student evaluations and the social interaction aspects of learning in later articles.

Increasingly, teachers in higher education and non-formal corporate training are also reviewed by their students, and sometimes their wages and even employment are dependent on those reviews.

But a simple 5 star rating and a verbal explanation is not going to be enough. Unfortunately, many training companies use an overall satisfaction rating as the meter for teacher competence, which in turn leads teachers to please the participants, rather than honestly telling them how they need to improve. While common courtesy is of course part of civilized interactions, being too polite is in fact unrespectful and will damage the learning that could be possible with suitable interventions.

Teaching and learning are complex processes, much more so than a car ride or an online auction sale. And while a sharing economy needs reviews in order to increase trust within its ecosystem, the processes of learning and teaching need to develop as well, and without appropriate feedback, that development will not be possible.

Many universities ask students to rate each course at its end. There are numerous ways to collect feedback, although most commonly you’ll see a battery of Likert-scale questions (often 1–5 scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree) on various topics ranging from the practicalities to the perceived usefulness of the course. Statistics or visualizations made from this feedback may show how students’ perception of the course changes from year to year, but it’s not self-evident that the feedback drives the teacher to improve their teaching methods or materials.

One should ask what the feedback is used for. If its reason is to prove the quality of teaching to the university board, the questions will need to cover things like student satisfaction and progress, work amount, matching of course description to actuality, and such things.

If the reason is to help the teacher improve, the questions should ask for frank constructive criticism: What disappointed the learner? How could the teacher help the student better? What could be done to make the learning materials support learning more?

Some questions make sense for large classes: scheduling, work load, timing, difficulty of progression. In personal and individualized coaching, however, these questions make no sense, as the teacher, in their discussions with the learners, will have immediately seen any problems with work loads or other difficulties, and adjusted the individual learning paths accordingly.

A crucial bit of knowledge for a teacher is understanding the ways in which learners will misunderstand key concepts. For an expert in any topic, understanding what’s difficult to a novice is not self-evident, as for the experts, there is no difficulty. Developing knowledge of student misconceptions (KOSM) is important for any teacher, and it usually develops through experience.[4] This development can be helped by making sure the teacher gets accurate data on their students’ misconceptions. Asking the class for right answers is not the way: encouraging students to explain their initial ideas or working theories is. An example of a pedagogical model that very effectively allows for KOSM development is Progressive Inquiry.[5]

If the reason is to help other learners decide which teacher or course is the best for them, then the following information should be available to them[3]:

• Does the teacher have enough expertise in the field? They should be at a higher skill level than their students.
• Does the teacher have experience in teaching this field? Do they have experience teaching others with the same initial skill set and background?
• How much progress have previous learners made? How good are they now? How much of their skill can be attributed to that teacher’s help?
• How much individualized feedback does the teacher provide? Do they guide you, not just telling you what to do, but what to pay attention to, what errors you’ve made, and how to recognize good performance?

Regarding the last item in the list, of course not all teachers will be providing individual feedback during the learning process. Some teachers have hundreds of students, and simply cannot focus on each and every student. But it is clear that getting personal tutoring from a competent tutor will be many times more effective than attending mass lectures and filling out computerized multiple-choice exams.

Feedback in LifeLearn

In the LifeLearn platform, everyone can be a learner and a teacher. Once you’ve learned something, you can attempt to teach it to others. LifeLearn’s skill paths and skill levels should clearly show everyone’s levels of expertise. An accumulation of publicly visible reviews should show the teacher’s growing experience in teaching in the field. Reviews can be filtered to show reviews from learners with similar backgrounds, to make them more relevant.

LifeLearn’s specific feedback questions to learners as they complete a skill path will most likely focus on their opinion on how much the teacher and the materials helped them in acquiring the new skill, and how much individual guidance they received during the process.

Some teachers will be personal coaches, while others will just coordinate massive open online courses. We expect that some teachers will score 0 on their individual guidance feedbacks, but that’s a useful distinction. A potential learner can make an informed decision: Are they happy to learn under a common schedule with others, or do they wish to have personal training? I imagine the latter will have a higher price tag attached.

Summary

Feedback is of crucial importance in a two-way sharing economy, and keeping the reviews unbiased and genuine is vital to the success of a sharing platform. What kind of feedback to ask should be based on what the feedback is used for. The most helpful feedback on a teacher for a potential new learner is the teacher’s expertise, experience, contribution to learning, and amount and quality of individualized guidance.

References

1. Malhotra, A., & Van Alstyne, M. (2014). The dark side of the sharing economy … and how to lighten it. Communications of the ACM, 57(11), 24–27. http://doi.org/10.1145/2668893

2. Luca, M., & Zervas, G. (2013). Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud. Harvard Business School NOM Unit Working Paper, No. 14–006, 1–25. http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2293164

3. Ericsson, K. A., & Pool, R. (2016). Peak : Secrets from the new science of expertise. Bodley Head.

4. Sadler, P. M., Sonnert, G., Coyle, H. P., Cook-Smith, N., & Miller, J. L. (2013). The Influence of Teachers’ Knowledge on Student Learning in Middle School Physical Science Classrooms. American Educational Research Journal, 50(5), 1020–1049. http://doi.org/10.3102/0002831213477680

5. Leinonen, T., Virtanen, O., Hakkarainen, K., & Kligyte, G. (2002). Collaborative discovering of key ideas in knowledge building. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning: Foundations for a CSCL Community (pp. 529–530). International Society of the Learning Sciences.

About the Author

Tarmo Toikkanen is Chief Learning Scientist at LifeLearn Platform. He has over a decade of research experience in the fields of learning environments, participatory design, and educational psychology. His passion is to save the world by helping people learn and teach in better ways. This article is part of a series to explain LifeLearn Platform’s ideas on learning.