Digitalizing Teacher-Student Feedback Loop
- By Lachlan Colquhoun
- May 02, 2022
One of the significant challenges in education, particularly virtual education, is communication between student and teacher.
How can a teacher know if their methods are getting through to students and if they are engaging and inspiring them to learn?
For students, and this is especially true for younger students, there have always been cultural barriers to giving teachers feedback. In more traditional education systems, it can be seen to be impertinent and almost disobedient to suggest to a teacher that they are failing to get their message through.
Fortunately, the education system has moved on from this divide, and digital tools are part of the solution.
‘Check in’ for students
In the Education Technology space, one of the leaders in this area is Australia-based company Verso, which has designed a cloud-based “check-in” tool for students, now used by around 30,000 students worldwide, with a goal of reaching one million.
“One of the exciting things about technology and learning and teaching is capturing and learning about those transactions in the classroom,” says Colin Wood, Verso’s founder and chief executive.
“Teaching can so often be a lonely profession. You do it in a room and with the door closed.”
Verso aims to give teachers “more access to the student voice and valuable learning feedback.”
Wood was working with schools in the UK and moved to Australia, founding Verso in Melbourne in 2009. Although Australian-based and with a core client in the Victorian state Department of Education and engagement with other Victorian schools, Verso is being used worldwide and has particular traction in the U.S., where education authorities have adopted it in South Carolina and New York State.
“Our mission is to use the student voice to improve the quality of teaching and learning”
The Verso solution now leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning and a layer of analytics powered by Google to deliver more accurate insights to teachers based on machine learning applied to more than 100,000 student responses to the Verso “check in” questionnaire, which students complete.
“We can give a teacher an immediate insight into whether a student can explain what they are learning in detail,” says Wood.
“We can understand if a student has understood a broad concept of what he or she is learning, and if they can talk specifically about what they learned.”
By giving data to the teachers in real-time, they can understand the level the students are at, and these insights enable teachers to tailor their approach to individual students or smaller groups of students at the same level.
“Of course, personalization is difficult because if you’ve got 25 students in front of you, you can’t teach the lesson 25 different ways,” says Wood.
“But what Verso helps teachers to do is zoom in on what are some of the priorities of students, and understand what they need from the teacher and how they can start to better meet their learning needs.”
Verso’s ongoing rollout is well-timed, given the recent experience of students during the pandemic.
“Everybody is trying to think about how do we improve classroom engagement because kids have been sitting in front of Zoom for the last two years,” says Wood. Absenteeism in many schools is “through the roof” in the US and rising in Australia.
“So, how do we get students more engaged in what they are learning?”
Capturing the student's voice
Wood concedes that it has been some journey for Verso’s product from inception to where it is now in its current iteration.
The company’s mission is to “use the student voice to improve the quality of teaching and learning,” and Wood says there have been eight to ten years of “stubbing our toes and working out how to do it and continuously evolving and iterating.”
The current version, he says, is the most simplistic but also the most effective yet, helped by a combination of cloud technology and Google’s supervised machine learning capability based on over four million student responses.
One measure of success is that now when teachers run what is called a Verso “check-in”, 87% of them say “they had an a-ha moment about their practice.”
Ultimately, the idea is to empower teachers to give students what they are asking for based on direct feedback. It’s a virtuous circle that circumvents older education norms and uses technology to create a positive feedback loop to deliver better outcomes for all stakeholders.
“We talk about it as Garmin for teaching,” says Wood.
“We had some feedback from school districts in Florida only last week, and the comment they made was that they love the tools because they are not only easy to use, they are thoughtful and impactful.
“They’re designed to really shift the needle, and I think they are starting to do just that.”
Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their entire business models. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/gorodenkoff