Enhancing communication through formative assessment and feedback in an online “academic conference”

Online teaching and learning pose constraints to teacher-student and student-student communication. It is important for teachers to create opportunities for dialogue with and among students. Based on the data collected from a student survey and interviews and students' online posts, this chapter showcases how communication was enhanced through a series of online activities to facilitate student learning. In a master's elective course, a summative assessment task comprised a poster presentation in an online “academic conference” in which students presented their design of classroom activities and interacted with their teacher and peers on Moodle. The findings reveal that students valued the formative feedback received at the preparation stage from their peers in a non-assessed “warm-up” task, teacher feedback in a consultation session, and a workshop explaining the assessment criteria with exemplars. They enjoyed the critical dialogue with their teacher and peers regarding their designed activities on the posters at the assessment stage. The students also consolidated the feedback after the conference to “feedforward” their individual essays which required them to critique teaching activities. This chapter offers pedagogical implications for enhancing communication through an online community of student learning. Copyright © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Kevin Wai Ho Yung and Huixuan Xu; individual chapters, the contributors.