Rethinking the Order of Feedback: Introducing Scheduled Feedback Feature
We know feedback matters. Decades of research, from Hattie and Timperley's work on feedback effectiveness through to Boud's writing on feedback literacy, tell us that comments, not grades, are what actually move students learning forward. Yet in practice, students routinely skim past feedback straight to the mark, treat the number as the final word, and disengage from everything else on the page. Multiple approaches have tried to fix this: dialogic feedback, feed-forward tasks, peer review before grading. But one obstacle has stayed constant regardless of pedagogy. VLEs release grades and comments together, so no matter how good the comment is, it's competing with a number for the student's attention. What if we broke that pairing at the platform level?
Scheduled Feedback Release changes that. This new capability, in the Gradebook's existing Grade Posting Policy settings, gives tutors the ability to control, independently of one another, when rubric comments, submission comments, and marks become visible to students. Comments and grades can be released together, or on entirely separate schedules, through a simple comment scheduler built directly into the assignment posting policy.
How It Works, Briefly
The feature builds on the Grade Posting Policy tutors already know. From an assignment's Options menu in the Gradebook, selecting the manual posting policy now reveals the option to schedule release dates, and to choose whether comments and grades go out together or on separate schedules.
From the student side, if comments are released ahead of marks, rubric comments and general feedback comments appear as normal, but any points entered in the rubric, and any annotations made on the submission itself, stay hidden until the scored release point. Nothing needs to be manually "unhidden" for this to happen, it's built into the schedule tutors set.
Tutors also retain full manual control throughout: grades can still be posted early if circumstances change, ahead of any schedule that's been set.
Please note: If comments and grades are set on separate schedules, comments must be released before the grade, the order can't be reversed.
If you have selected to release feedback early, tutor comments in the rubric and general comments are released; however, if there are marks in the rubric these will not be released, and note that no annotations on the document will be released. If the release date has passed all comments will be released automatically as they are written into these areas.