Summary of the thesis

Feedback is increasingly considered a social and contextual process, rather than the simple transfer of information about student work. However, adopting such a view of feedback adds considerable complexity for researchers who seek to understand authentic feedback processes as they occur in uncontrolled settings. Through four studies, this thesis addresses some of the conceptual, methodological, and empirical issues arising from this complexity and suggests new ways of researching feedback processes in online higher education.

The first study analyses metaphorical language used in recent research publications to explore how feedback is conceptualized by online education scholars. This analysis generated six conceptual metaphors, representing six different conceptualizations of feedback and its role in online learning. Most of these metaphors align with information-transfer conceptualizations, that are increasingly considered inadequate because they imply that the teacher is the main agent in the feedback process and that the feedback information provided to learners automatically leads to learning. The study suggests that the notion of conceptual metaphors can help researchers engage critically with their own often implicit understandings and that deliberate use of metaphors to conceptualize feedback can provide a helpful basis for research on feedback in online higher education.

Most current studies into digitally mediated feedback practices are experimental, based on the idea that the transfer of feedback information is a treatment with an effect size. In such research, contextual factors are treated as noise in the data and consequently such designs have serious limitations when it comes to researching feedback as a social and contextual process. This thesis argues that the research on feedback in online higher education would benefit from research that employs a naturalistic design, which enables the exploration of authentic feedback processes in uncontrolled settings. It proposes that the family of methods and approaches known as digital ethnography can provide the methodology for such research.

Digital ethnography, while common in the broader social sciences, has not been used frequently in higher education research. To uncover setting-specific opportunities and challenges, the second study of this thesis provides a methodological review of previous research in this space. Among the key opportunities offered by digital ethnography are the ready access to study participants and the inclusion of multiple types of rich unstructured data, even from beyond the scope of the online course room. The limitations of ready access are seen in the widespread use of teacher-researchers and the associated practical and ethical questions that arise when researchers do fieldwork that involves their own students. The thesis argues that digital ethnography, drawing from ethnography’s long tradition of rigour and ethics, provides a novel and superior approach to empirical investigations of feedback in online higher education.

The third and fourth studies of this thesis tie together the conceptual and methodological work of the two previous studies by conducting a cross-national digital ethnographic study of how students experience and enact feedback in online higher education. This work is underpinned by a conceptualization of feedback as a complex process which unfolds through feedback encounters.

In the third study, the notion of feedback encounter is developed into an analytical lens that can be used to analyse how students experience and use authentic feedback processes. Based on the identification and analysis of 80 feedback encounters, the study proposes three main categories of encounters: elicited, formal and incidental. These three types vary according to the student’s ability to control the process, resulting in the encounters being experienced, enacted, and used in significantly different ways. The analysis also identified the ways that feedback encounters interconnect and showed how this can be handled in an analysis. This perspective allows for an analysis of complex processes by focussing on the moments when students engage with and make sense of feedback information in order to improve their understanding or performance. Although this involves a necessary reduction of complexity, this can be done without excluding contextual factors, making it suitable for empirical research that conceptualises feedback as a contextual and relational process.

The fourth study uses the analytical approach developed in the third study, to explore what characterizes productive feedback encounters. The study finds that while most encounters did have a positive impact, this was mostly instrumental, e.g. involving minor edits to students’ work, and only few feedback encounters appeared to have had substantive impact on learning. The encounters with substantive impact tended to include a challenge to students’ assumptions about themselves and their work, rather than simply corrections that did not require deep reflection or sense-making. The analysis identified two conditions working across elicited, formal, and incidental encounters that influenced whether an encounter turns out to have a substantive impact on learning. The first condition is that the student needs to be willing and able to make sense of the challenge to assumptions and the second is that the encounter must happen at a time when the student is open to being challenged. The analysis showed that timing was experienced as relative to whatever task the student is currently working on, rather than as a matter of time passed since completion of the performance that the encounter addresses.

This work makes a substantial and original contribution to the field of feedback in online higher education. The approaches that are developed through the four studies provide novel ways to bring the empirical study of feedback in online higher education in line with the theoretical and conceptual progresses that have characterized general feedback research. In doing so, the thesis also identifies characteristics of how students experience and use feedback that contribute new perspectives to general feedback research. The digitalization of feedback practices in both online and campus education means that future research may benefit from a more integrated approach to the study of feedback in higher education.

Studies (open access)

Jensen, LX, M Bearman, and D Boud. 2021. ‘Understanding Feedback in Online Learning - A Critical Review and Metaphor Analysis’. COMPUTERS & EDUCATION 173 (November). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2021.104271.

Jensen, LX, M Bearman, and D Boud. 2022. ‘Feedback Encounters: Towards a Framework for Analysing and Understanding Feedback Processes’. ASSESSMENT & EVALUATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2022.2059446.

Jensen, LX, M Bearman, D Boud, and F Konradsen. 2022. ‘Digital Ethnography in Higher Education Teaching and Learning - a Methodological Review’. HIGHER EDUCATION. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00838-4.