Feedback Methods Compared — Candidate 3: Feedback Files

Before Turnitin, before LMSs, before Google Drive, students would mail us their essays, usually as a Word document, and we would mail feedback, usually in the form of comments on their document. As I mentioned in the first post in this series, the email part wasn’t wonderful, but old-fashioned files are still my favourite feedback method (unless I want to give real-time feedback, which I’ll deal with in the next post).

There are commercial programs for marking students’ work; however, a normal word processor can easily be customised to provide the same functionality (I recommend LibreOffice, since it handles styles well, and is free). It is worth spending some time on this, since attempting to give detailed feedback on essays with an unmodified processor will take longer than marking them by hand; many teachers rely on Word’s Track Changes function, but that is really not what it was designed for. The three methods that we can employ to make feedback easier are templates, autotext and macros.

Templates can be used at two stages. First, you may want to make a template for students to use for their work. This ensures the following:

• all the necessary cover page information is printed (some of it, like the date and word count, can be inserted automatically);
• the page size and margins are correct;
• students use the font you prefer, rather than half a dozen different, and often unreadable fonts;
• styles are set up for various paragraph types, such as bibliography entries, footnotes and blockquotes.

The second template will be for feedback; as well as containing you own preferred styles, it can include a form at the end for feedback on different areas (content, language etc.). On receiving a file, you open your marking template, insert the file into it, and save it as, say, ali_essay2_draft_feedback.docx. When you have finished with it, you then simply mail it to the student or (more likely these days) upload it to your LMS.

Autotext is a feature provided by many word processors; it enables commonly-used phrases to be stored and inserted via a menu or key-bindings (“hot keys” or “shortcuts” in Windows-speak). Take for example something I would find myself writing often as an English teacher: “You are trying to get too many ideas into the same paragraph. Split it up so that each paragraph contains one main idea.” I could add that to Autotext and then trigger it with a key sequence or access it from a menu.

On the other hand, if that is too much hassle, you can just keep a text file with all the things that you write often and copy-paste text from there.

Macros are where it really starts to rock. You can record sequences of moves and bind them to one command, which can be accessed by a key-binding or a button on the tool-bar. The tool-bar here shows macros which I set up to highlight different types of error. For example, the button labelled “gr” highlights grammar errors in blues and underlines them, while “irr” highlights irrelevant text in green and crosses it out.

While creating feedback files happens on your own machine, this method integrates seamlessly with any LMS without the need for third-party plugins or licenses, as is the case with Turnitin, for example. This gives you the best of both words, as your (and your students’) work exists both on your own mahine and in the cloud, giving an added layer of security.

Summary

Advantages

• Uses familiar tools
• Highly customisable
• Files stay on your own computer
• Part of any LMS

Disadvantages

• Takes some time to set up
• Doesn’t have standard rubrics
• Hard to share resources such as autotext

Having tried other feedback methods such as PDF annotation and Grademark (as decribed in previous articles) and come back to feeback files, I can safely say they are my favourite method for giving feedback after the event. However, nowadays it is possible to give feedback while students are still writing, and this will be the topic of the final article in this series.

• About
• Latest Posts

Robin Turner

Learning Technologist at Global Banking School

Until recently, EAP instructor and Moodle systems administrator at Bilkent University, Ankara, now Learning Technologist at the Global Banking School’s London Greenford campus. Interested in educational technology and gamification/game-based learning.

Latest posts by Robin Turner (see all)

• Quizzes Compared: Final (Everyone’s a Winner, Baby) – 1st February 2025
• Diffit: Quick and Dirty Materials Preparation – 2nd June 2024
• Learning Technologies 2024 Exhibition – Impressions – 2nd May 2024