Orchestration and feedback in lab sessions: Improvements in quick feedback provision

Abstract

The benefits of formative assessment and the provision of quick feedback to the learners are unquestionable. A lot of effort needs however to be devoted by the teacher in order to assess the learner's status and providing quality and valuable feedback when actually implementing these techniques in real-world situations during active learning activities. The aim of this work is to offer teachers a tool that facilitates the quick provision of relevant feedback to the students, implemented as backchannel notifications in a lab session for ensuring scalability. Although being a work-in-progress, the aforementioned tool has been partially evaluated in a real course on programming multimedia applications. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.