The answer to the title is, extremely important!

Effective feedback is essential to student growth and understanding. I had a student that decided to wait until the last minute to do ALL of the class assignments (I’m sure we all have a few of these) the biggest issue for me wasn’t getting all of that grading dumped on me at the last semester, it is that I had to keep making the same correction in all of his assignments. All of those lost points could have been avoided if he had read the comments and addressed the issues on his first assignment before turning in all of the others. This would have allowed him to score higher on a lot of assignments, and grading would have been a lot less of a headache for me. I think that this case specifically shows why feedback is so important. We are here to steer students in the right direction, but they need to allow us the time to do that.

In my opinion, feedback is most effective when it has a positive tone, and when it is conversation based. I like to offer my opinion on a subject (especially if it is an opinion-based discussion assignment) and then I ask them, “What do you think?” or I give them a more specific question to get them thinking about the original prompt in a more detailed manner. I think that this is an approach that allows students to come to their own conclusion about something, rather than telling them their answer is incorrect and just giving them the correct answer.

Feedback as an example:

The other role that feedback plays, besides working on actual content, is that it provides an example of appropriate constructive feedback to students that might not learn this anywhere else. For example, students can see how to respectfully disagree with someone in a place where tone can easily be construed as offensive. I think that as online educators we are not only teaching students class material, but also how to operate in the online world, which is essential seeing that our world/economy is constantly becoming more and more digitally based.

Overall, I think that effective feedback is extremely important, WHAT DO YOU THINK?