Why Peer Feedback is Important
Peer review is a powerful teaching tool that can reinforce student learning and enhance critical thinking and communication skills all at once. Receiving detailed feedback is also a reality for just about any career, so doing peer feedback in the classroom is a helpful career preparation step.
Managing peer review, especially in a larger course, is time consuming and it is difficult to share results with students so they can learn from their feedback. Blackboard's built-in survey tool is not of much help: it lacks a student view of their results and is limited to basic questions and even more basic reporting.
Feedback Loop is a dedicated peer review tool that works seamlessly within Blackboard LMS and offers many advantages over doing surveys manually. In this post, we detail how Feedback Loop can help you create effective and engaging peer review activities in your Blackboard courses.
What is Feedback Loop?
Feedback Loop is an online student peer feedback tool that works within Learning Management Systems like Blackboard. Feedback Loop integrates with Blackboard’s grade center, assignment tool, and roster, so there is no need for separate separate accounts or manually imported student data. For students, the entire user experience is inside the LMS.
Feedback Loop supports peer review, self review and even team lead review, for teamwork-based courses with a designated team leader. Faculty can build their own peer survey templates, use one a colleague created with the shared template library, or use a Feedback Loop provided template.
Feedback Loop provides a rich learning experience for students with its auto-generated performance report so that students learn from their received feedback. Faculty and instructors can evaluate results, identify outliers and quickly identify student performance, even in large courses.
How Feedback Loop brings high quality peer review to Blackboard
Feedback Loop is designed specifically for peer review, and it offers many features and benefits that the survey tool in Blackboard does not. Here are some of the ways that Feedback Loop can improve the peer review experience:
- Feedback Loop allows teams to rate one another across a variety of dimensions including the new points allocation question type where students get a pool of points to allocate among their team.
- Feedback Loop asks students to review themselves, alongside their peers, for a full picture of student performance that simulates workplace team reviews.
- Students get a tailored, automatically generated performance report based on their received feedback and it's alignment (or lack of alignment) with their self evaluation.
- Reporting in Feedback Loop is optimized for ease of use so faculty can quickly sift through even a large number of survey results.
How can you get started with Feedback Loop?
Feedback Loop is easy to use and integrate with Blackboard courses. Contact us to implement Feedback Loop at the course, department or school-wide levels. Once Feedback Loop is installed in a Blackboard course, faculty and instructors can immediately send peer review surveys. Feedback Loop is fully supported with its support center and 7 day a week online support.
Conclusion
Peer review is a valuable learning tool that benefits students twice: first when they analyze and provide feedback on their peers' performance and again when reviewing student their own performance results. However, the survey tool in Blackboard is clunky, time consuming to use for larger courses and lacks a student performance report. Feedback Loop is a tailored solution that is easier to use and provides a richer student experience, right inside Blackboard.
Feedback Loop works within the LMS (including Blackboard). Contact us for a demo to see if it would be a useful tool for your school, department or course!
