Abstract:

Instructors should consider responsible feedback as one of their main priorities on their learning and teaching strategies. It is well known that feedback is the bridge between students’ and instructors, as students’ work and efforts are reviewed and put into an appropriate learning context. Feedback should be viewed as the vehicle that allows students achieving settled academic standards at the time that encourage and guide them to work harder with the aim of fulfilling their true potential. Quality feedback acts as a main motivator to students because they are able to identify specific areas that require improvement. Feedback offers appropriate coaching and guidance to students, helping them to understand how they should progress to align their work with the best practices identified in their curriculums. We need to remember that students are learners and that they need tutoring, mentoring, objective and clear guidelines that aim at keeping them focused and motivated on their learning that will help them succeed on their studies. Additionally, we need to reflect on the role of instructors in this process. Instructors should be capable of elaborating responsible feedback to communicate course goals to their students in an efficient and constructive manner. Traditionally, instructors struggle with the feedback process as they need to deal with a diversity of issues like: time constraints, workloads, class size, type and frequency of assignments, course goals and objectives, students negative perceptions on feedback and assessment, administrative responsibilities. All these issues impact in a negative manner on the instructors’ ability to provide timely, quality and responsible feedback to their students. We argue that ePortfolios help instructors to overcome these challenges and help them developing quality and responsible feedback, and they also encourage students to take ownership on their learning with a student centred approach.

Keywords:

Responsible Feedback, ePortfolios, Student-Centred-Approach.