In this article, Dr. Tiffany Lubken explores how students and instructors can make feedback more useful in flexible and online learning environments. She offers practical ideas for students who want to learn from feedback as they move through their coursework, as well as educators looking for ways to help feedback carry forward from one assignment to the next.
- Fast progress can outpace feedback. When online learners submit several assignments before receiving feedback on earlier ones, they miss the chance to fix recurring mistakes before they repeat — flexibility is a strength, but only if learning keeps pace with submissions.
- Useful feedback points forward, not just back. Instructors can make feedback more actionable by flagging the one or two patterns most likely to affect future work instead of listing every possible correction with equal weight.
Closing the loop is a two-way effort. Students benefit from pausing to review prior feedback before starting similar work, while faculty can build in natural checkpoints — without creating extra workload or slowing motivated students down.
Every semester, I see students trying to make the most of their time.
For adult learners, that makes sense. Many are balancing coursework with careers, families and responsibilities that do not stop when class begins. One of the advantages of flexible online education is that students have greater control over their pace. When they understand the material and are ready to demonstrate it, they can keep moving rather than wait for the calendar to catch up.
Sometimes, however, that flexibility creates an unintended challenge.
A motivated student may submit several assessments within a short period of time, eager to maintain momentum and continue progressing toward a degree. But when the next assignment is submitted before feedback from the previous one is available, the student loses an opportunity to apply what they learned from the last performance.
I may open one paper and see that a student has misunderstood how to evaluate a source, support a conclusion or apply an important course concept. By the time I provide feedback, two more assignments may already contain the same problem.
The student is progressing through the course. But the learning process has not necessarily had the same opportunity to progress.
That distinction matters.
Feedback Is Only Useful If It Changes What Comes Next
Faculty spend considerable time providing feedback because we want students to use it. Yet delivering feedback and creating an opportunity for students to act on it are not the same thing.
Researchers John Hattie and Helen Timperley described effective feedback around three basic questions:
- Where am I going?
- How am I going?
- And where to next?
That last question is particularly important.
Feedback should not simply explain what happened on an assignment that has already been completed. It should give the learner something useful to carry into the next one.
That requires participation from students, too. Research on student feedback literacy has emphasized that learners need to be able to understand feedback, make judgments about their work and take action based on what they receive. Other research has similarly highlighted the learner’s active role in engaging with feedback.
In practice, that can be difficult once a student has already mentally moved on.
The challenge is not unique to online learning. In a traditional course, a student might receive detailed comments on a paper, look at the grade and immediately turn to the next deadline. The feedback technically exists, but its usefulness may end with the assignment it was attached to.
Flexible learning environments can make that tension especially visible because students often have greater control over when they move forward.
That flexibility should remain a strength. The goal is not to slow motivated students down. It is to make sure progress through a course does not become disconnected from the opportunity to learn from previous work.
Submission Pace and Learning Pace Are Not Always the Same
One of the most appealing aspects of online education is that learners do not have to wait simply because a calendar tells them to. Students who understand the material can demonstrate competency and continue progressing.
But mastery involves more than completing assignments quickly.
Learning also requires opportunities to test our understanding, discover where it falls short, make adjustments and try again. A review of mastery learning describes this cycle of assessment, feedback and improvement as central to helping learners reach competency.
That means educators should think not only about how quickly students can move through a course, but whether the course gives them meaningful opportunities to improve from one assessment to the next.
That does not necessarily mean locking students out of their next assignment or imposing an artificial waiting period. Faculty can encourage students to review prior feedback before beginning similar work, build a brief self-check into assignment instructions or identify points in a course where feedback is especially important before moving forward.
The goal is not to create another hurdle. It is to give students a natural moment to ask: “What did I learn from the last assignment that should change what I do here?”
Assessment sequence matters, too.
If students will use the same skill repeatedly, whether they are evaluating evidence, applying a clinical concept or developing an argument, earlier assignments can give them an opportunity to practice before that skill carries greater weight later in the course.
Feedback then has somewhere to go. The next assignment becomes an opportunity to demonstrate growth rather than simply another task to complete.
The question should not be, “How do we slow students down?”
It should be, “How do we make sure momentum and learning continue together?”
Make the Next Step Clear
Faculty cannot solve this challenge simply by writing more feedback.
A page of comments may be thoughtful and accurate, but it can also leave a student wondering what matters most. For learners balancing school with work, family and other commitments, the most useful feedback is often the feedback that makes the next action clear.
Instead of identifying every possible improvement with equal weight, I try to identify the one or two patterns most likely to affect the student’s future work.
Rather than writing only, “This source is not integrated effectively,” I might explain, “In your next assignment, focus on explaining how each source supports the conclusion you are making.”
Instead of correcting the same citation problem sentence by sentence, I can identify the larger pattern and tell the student what to look for when reviewing the next draft.
A simple phrase such as “Carry this into your next assignment” can also help distinguish an important recurring issue from a correction that applies only to the work at hand.
These are small changes, but they shift the purpose of feedback. The comment is no longer only about an assignment that has been completed. It becomes guidance the student can use again.
It is equally important to acknowledge when that happens.
A brief comment such as, “Your source integration is much stronger in this assessment,” tells the student that applying prior feedback made a visible difference.
That closes the loop.
As David Carless has argued in his work on longer-term feedback, the process should carry forward across tasks rather than ending with a single completed assignment.
Students Have a Role in Closing the Loop, Too
In a flexible learning environment, managing pace is also part of managing learning.
That can mean resisting the understandable urge to treat a submitted assignment as finished business. Before beginning similar work, students can return to instructor comments and ask themselves what one or two lessons should carry forward.
For an adult learner with limited time, that habit does not have to be complicated. It might mean spending a few intentional minutes reviewing the priorities identified by an instructor before beginning the next assessment. It could mean checking a new draft against a recurring issue from the previous one. Or it could simply mean recognizing that moving quickly and learning efficiently are not always the same thing.
Those few minutes may ultimately save time. A misunderstanding addressed once does not have to follow a student through several more assignments.
That is part of developing as an independent learner: not simply receiving feedback, but knowing how to use it.
The Answer Cannot Simply Be More Faculty Work
Conversations about improving feedback often produce well-intentioned recommendations:
- Record personalized videos
- Schedule individual meetings
- Create reflection assignments
- Add another feedback activity
Those approaches can be valuable. They are also difficult to sustain in every instructional environment, particularly when faculty are supporting large numbers of students.
Better feedback does not always require more feedback.
Sometimes it means making the feedback already being provided more useful.
Rather than commenting equally on every issue, an instructor might identify the two patterns most likely to affect the student’s next assessment. Faculty can make those priorities easy to recognize, explain what should change next time and acknowledge when improvement appears.
Those practices require thoughtfulness, but they do not necessarily require another platform, meeting or assignment.
That matters because teaching practices need to work for the people on both sides of the learning experience.
Flexibility Works Best When Feedback Can Travel With the Student
Adult learners value efficiency for good reason. Time matters. Flexibility matters. For many students, the ability to fit education around the rest of their lives can make pursuing a degree possible in the first place.
But educational efficiency should not be measured only by how quickly an assignment moves from incomplete to submitted.
Sometimes the most efficient thing a learner can do is pause long enough to understand one important piece of feedback and apply it before moving forward. Doing so may prevent the same misunderstanding from following that student through several assignments.
Closing that loop is a shared responsibility. Courses should create opportunities for feedback to matter. Faculty should make the next step clear. Students should recognize that moving forward sometimes means looking back first.
For educators, that means thinking about feedback as more than the final step in grading.
The measure of useful feedback is not how much we write. It is whether the next piece of student work is better because of it.
When students can recognize what matters, carry that lesson forward and see the improvement themselves, feedback becomes part of learning rather than simply part of grading.
