Providing Effective Feedback in an online Environment

This paper documents the strategies used in providing students with feedback in a large-scale action research project that was designed to help students develop their language and literacy skills. The Scaffolding Literacy in Academic and Tertiary Environments (SLATE) was designed to provide students in a university in Hong Kong with discipline specific language and literacy support (see Mahboob, Dreyfus, Humphrey, and Martin, 2010, for a detailed description of the program). This support was provided by language tutors from around the world - with a large team of the tutors based in Sydney. In order to do this work, the SLATE team in Sydney developed a number of protocols and procedures for providing online support to the students. This paper describes these processes in some detail. However, before we do that, the paper briefly introduces the SLATE project and highlights its theoretical underpinnings.