“Feedback is not Embarrassing but Helpful :)”: An Exploratory Study on the Applicability of Constructive Feedback Checklists for Lecturers in Online Learning Settings

Feedback about students’ learning process and behaviour is one of the most effective strategies to immediately impact learning progress. Learning analytics and other educational technologies often provide automatic feedback to students. Therefore, it is critical to address automatic feedback’s potential positive and negative impacts on students’ well-being. This research paper discusses the development and implementation of a checklist for creating constructive and actionable feedback in online learning settings. We refined our literature-based checklist during expert workshops and an online focus group and applied it to a higher education course. The course used a flipped classroom approach, and students were asked to create videos, complete quizzes, and engage in self-reflection. The quizzes were followed by automatic detailed feedback based on our developed feedback guidelines. We collected qualitative data on emotional valence and activation potential and gathered opinions from students using open-ended questions. Quantitative data was collected using an online evaluation questionnaire, and the interaction patterns with the self-assessment quizzes and other materials on Moodle were analysed. The preliminary results suggest that students perceived the employed feedback elements positively, but the feedback may not be activating enough for well-performing students. Lastly, we discuss the value of the suggested checklist in light of emerging AI chatbots like ChatGPT and consider possible venues to improve it.