PERSONALIZED E-FEEDBACK AND INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES (ICT)

In the context of the adaptation of the new undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate degrees to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), the student centered learning (SCL) is an approach which aims to overcome some of the problems inherent to more traditional forms of education by focusing on the learner and their needs, rather than being centred around the teacher’s input. Thus the student becomes the protagonist of his learning process by means of doing learning exercises or activities.

So, these learning exercises or activities constitute the axis the student’s learning process. As far as they are evaluated and corrected in a systematic and rigorous form, they turn into the most direct and automatic channel that allows the student to get clear and concrete information on the foreseen aims’ and competences’ attainment.

It is in this context, that SCL requires empowering individual learners, new approaches to teaching and learning, effective support and guidance structures focused more clearly on the learner. So, the support function and a close personalized relation between the tutor and the student are basic in order to guarantee that each student may attain the aims and the competences corresponding to each one of the exercises of the continuous evaluation activities, as well as to the whole subject itself.

Therefore, in order achieve the adaptation to the EHEA, the improvement of the learning process and to promote a greater motivation of the students, the implementation of a high quality personalized feedback becomes a key factor. It is in this sense that the number of students for classroom will be an important limiting element, taking into account that a personalized feedback requires many times and a big effort.

The aim of this article is to analyse the effectiveness and the efficiency of giving a more personalized feedback by means of ICT to the learning exercises or activities done by the students. The way to achieve it is to offer the tutors a diversity of multimedia tools (text, oral, video, etc...) that facilitates this task. The objective is to reduce the time of preparing the feedback and thus to make it easier as well as to achieve a higher impact.

To make this comment, different complementary alternative forms to written feedback have been explored in order to achieve greater motivation and greater impact. This alternative forms have been chosen taking into account the personality of the tutors participating in the project as well as their origins and profession paying special attention to their abilities in transmitting knowledge. That's why one of the main proposals is trying to get best communicative capabilities of each one.

Thus, different types of feedback have been investigated by using multimedia technologies (recordings in video, recordings of audio, capture of screens with audio and the possibility to hang videos compressed), which are supposed to make feedback easier.

The results show that the students find personalized feedback very positive, because it makes learning easier and thus more motivating. In order to implement personalized feedback in an efficient way from the tutor’s point of view, several actions should be undertaken such as technical training in communication and pedagogy, modifying the way of correcting the exercises or activities and also adapting the dimension of the classroom by taking into account that the number of students is a key element for this tutorial model.