Abstract:

Every educational design should provide feedback to improve the educational intervention, to increase students’ engagement and academic achievement and to personalize the learning process. Over the past years, the importance of feedback has been emphasized (Liu and Carless, 2006; Nicol, 2007). It has been an evolution in his conceptualization currently understood as a process in which the student is responsible itself (Boud and Molloy, 2013). Is in this evolution of feedback where technology has become essential as a way to regulate the gap between what is feedback and what should it be, since it offers tools that enable networking as well as interaction and collaboration as a basis for learning (Zapata-Ros, 2013). Thus, technology can provide the perfect environment for students to be more conscious of their own learning process. Moreover, research has advanced in the statement of the need of feedback to evolve to feedforward and to ensure that returns being given about a task or a process are being used for future processes, closing the loop of learning (Boud, 2013).

Learning is ubiquitous and often occurs in virtual environments. For this reason we must begin to plan how to design new learning environments that optimize learning and personal development and to think how to associate it with self-regulated learning strategies. From this perspective it is suggested that learning systems with technological resources incorporate the social web taking into account that social learning provides evidences on how the new competencies or ideas are not only personals but also individual goals developed and transmitted through interaction and collaborative processes. These are the main ideas that justify the need of an analysis of learning from a social perspective.

This work presents the research study “Design, implementation and assessment of sustainable feedforward proposals” (reference REDICE2014-966), funded by the Institute of Education Sciences at the University of Barcelona, that has the aim to design, implement and assess feedforward practices in all the degrees and universities participating in the project. Specifically, this paper wants to share the experience in a particular subject from the Education Degree at the University of Barcelona where the use of Twitter has been incorporated as a learning and peer-to-peer assessment activity as a way of improving participation and interaction of social networks where students learn by collaborative networking. For the analysis of this learning from a social perspective peer assessment has been incorporated in which students had to provide a constant feedback to their classmates about the quality of their tweets and about the resources and materials linked in them. The results of this experience have been collected using various data collection techniques: students’ survey, teachers’ survey, a guideline feedback and a study about the amount and quality of tweets. Also qualitative information is available from the responses of the survey answered by the participants to assess each other in which the information has been categorised obtaining information on the most common feedforward types and it uses.

The results of this research allow us to know, among other elements, the influence of feedforward for the improvement of future tasks and academic achievement and the benefits of using peer-to-peer assessment strategies in online environments.

Keywords:

Research, higher education, student learning, peer assessment, e-learning, web 2.0, Twitter.