Description
Moodle MyFeedback allows students to compare grades and feedback for assessment activities such as Moodle Assignments, Turnitin Assignments, Workshops (for peer assessment) and Quizzes in a single interface. It solves the issue of feedback being buried within Moodle courses and unable to be easily compared. It is also helping personal tutors to better understand the academic progress of their tutees and areas where they may need help. MyFeedback supports aspects of the Jisc Effective Learning Analytics programme, responding to “the need to show details of assessments already completed and grades obtained“ (Sclater 2014).
After a successful pilot in one faculty, MyFeedback has now been rolled out to all staff and students across UCL. In the four months since its launch in October 2016, it has received more than 86,000 unique page views and 17% of UCL staff and students have already used it (UCL 2017). A number of students are also using the self-reflective notes feature and some are also copying feedback from Turnitin, which is unable to be brought across automatically into the report.
The decision to release MyFeedback as an open-source Moodle plugin has enabled other institutions to benefit from this tool. Community members have contributed to resolve bugs and some have used the code to develop localised versions of the report. It is hoped they will also contribute to the development of new features. The plugin is available for download from https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=report_myfeedback and has been installed on over 260 Moodle installations worldwide.
“Making feedback by others – peers, teachers and self – more visible for comparative purposes is a vital step in improving feedback practice” (Hughes et al. 2017). The report helps students identify similarities in their feedback from across Moodle courses, so they can better assess their individual learning gain (Hughes et al. 2017) and improve their work in future assessments. This is currently supported by MyFeedback’s self-reflective notes feature, which allows students to plan improvements for future work with support from their Personal Tutors.
This presentation will demonstrate the MyFeedback report and discuss how it can be used by students, supported by their Personal Tutors, to reflect upon assessment feedback and feed it forward into future work. It will reveal how it is being used by UCL students and what changes to academic practice would make it even more useful.
A video demonstration of MyFeedback is available online: https://youtu.be/gI9Mq4qsFPs
References
Hughes, G., Hawkes, D., & Neumann, T. (2017). Use of Digital Technology to Capture and Support Student Progress Across a Taught Postgraduate Programme. In Ipsative Assessment and Personal Learning Gain (pp. 105–128). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. http://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56502-0_6 [Accessed: 14 March 2017].
Sclater, N. (2014) A student app for learning analytics. Effective Learning Analytics blog. [Online] 19 December. Available from: http://analytics.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2014/12/19/a-student-app-for-learning-analytics [Accessed: 14 March 2017].
UCL (2017), Vice-Provost’s View: Why we need to get assessment and feedback right. UCL Staff News. [Online] 2 March. Available from: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/staff/staff-news/march-2017/Vice-Provost-View-why-we-need-to-get-assessment-and-feedback-right [Accessed: 14 March 2017].