Providing timely assignment feedback to large online student cohorts

The strong market demand for psychology to be taught online has seen a rapid growth in enrolments in psychology units delivered by Open Universities Australia. Students studying in the online environment have expectations of a fast turnaround of their assignments along with an individual critique of their work. Such expectations can prove difficult to fulfill and the challenge will only be exacerbated as student numbers increase. This paper outlines four different models of assignment marking, adopted in an online Introductory Psychology unit with a high student enrolment and a correspondingly large teaching team. The first model of assignment marking focused on transitioning experienced on-campus teaching staff to the online environment. Subsequent models aimed to reduce inefficiencies in the assignment marking process, without a reduction in pedagogical effectiveness. The current model (Model 4) no longer includes the time-consuming process of annotating student's assignments with embedded comments. This change, while originally motivated purely by efficiency and budgetary constraints, has proved to be pedagogically effective. The faster return of grades accompanied by a brief individual comment on the overall quality of the work (rather than more extensive comments embedded as annotations within the assignment document) meets student expectations with respect to feedback, and when used in conjunction with more focused 'feedforward' through use of tutor teams and stronger tutor-student relationships, appears to provide a more effective teaching and learning outcome.