I was part of a team working on a piece back in 2021 about faster feedback in higher education. The title of the piece is Towards faster feedback in higher education through digitally mediated dialogic loops (Willis et al., 2021)
The motivating observation was that units tend to run across a semester (say, 13 weeks) and only after all of the teaching is completed is there any feedback from students.
The insight that my colleagues, Jill Willis and Andrew Gibson, had is that we want to have faster feedback loops, from week to week.
Andrew developed some software to aid university lecturers/professors in facilitating that because he’s a clever kind of guy: https://goingok.org/
It was used at our university (QUT in Australia) with students and then the data analysed, resulting in a paper. A key extract from the abstract is:
The findings identify and theorise four types of digitally mediated feedback loops: students in computer-mediated dialogue with themselves; students and teachers in dialogue with each other; the reflection on how feedback informed learning; and the sociotechnical dialogue informing ongoing technical design. Three design dilemmas that were experienced by teachers as they enacted digitally mediated dialogic feedback loops are articulated, alongside the principles that enabled responsive design. Understanding these design elements is fundamental if automation of some parts of the feedback loop through reflective writing analytics is to be considered both feasible and desirable.
I thought it was one of the more thoughtful papers that I’ve ever been involved in, but it received little attention, hence this belated post.
The identification of four feedback loops seems particularly useful:
- students in computer-mediated dialogue with themselves
- students and teachers in dialogue with each other
- the reflection on how feedback informed learning
- the sociotechnical dialogue informing ongoing technical design
My future work is going to look at the intersection of this space and the kind of understanding of learning design that we write about here (Kickbusch et al., 2025).
References
- Kickbusch, S., Kelly, N., & Huijser, H. (2025). Framing the core expertise of learning designers through strong concepts. Higher Education, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-025-01514-z
- Willis, J., Gibson, A., Kelly, N., Spina, N., Azordegan, J., & Crosswell, L. (2021). Towards faster feedback in higher education through digitally mediated dialogic loops. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 37(3), 22-37. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.5977