Kickstarting creative collaboration: placing authentic feedback at the heart of online digital media education

Abstract

Despite unprecedented demand for digital media skills many digital media graduates struggle to transition into employment because of the gap between university pedagogy and real-world professional practice. Traditionally, studio-based learning has been used to give students authentic experiences of the non-linear, interactive cycle of feedback, reflection and integration that occurs in creative professional practice; however, this approach is hard to implement in asynchronous, online environments and subsequently students miss out on the experience of creative collaboration that can help them to succeed in their future workplace. This study documents a pedagogical alternative where an online digital media capstone project course was redesigned around a formative feedback process using Padlet to facilitate ‘work-in-progress’ discussions to mirror the cycle of creative collaboration in the workplace. Students’ experiences of the formative feedback suggested that it developed both their content knowledge and their collaborative capabilities, with the timely and personal nature of the feedback, coupled with the industry-derived knowledge of the feedback providers, and the use of authentic, workplace relevant-technology, supporting students’ confidence to collaborate creatively. The findings can assist researchers, educators and academic developers looking to use authentic, formative feedback as a way of supporting students’ creativity, experimentation and collaborative capabilities.

Keywords:

• Online education
• authentic feedback
• employability
• creative collaboration
• curriculum design

Introduction

The unprecedented demand for digital media content means that employment opportunities for digital media creatives – digital media professionals who work in media industries or a range of other organisations to design and produce digital media content (Swan and Hearn 2014) – are expanding and constantly changing (Vilches 2021). The digital media sector is part of the creative industries, which, in 2020 employed 194,000 Australian workers and directly contributed $14.7 billion to Australia’s gross domestic product (Australia Institute 2021). Despite this demand, many creative graduates struggle to transition into the workforce (Bridgstock, Grant-Iramu, and McAlpine 2019) due to the ‘major disjunction’ that exists between the ‘world of creative work as imagined by aspiring undergraduates, promoted by their teachers and critiqued by researchers, and the world of creative work as it is actually enacted’ (Hearn 2020, 1). This disconnect is especially problematic for digital media students who must navigate highly competitive workplace environments in which they are required to have mastered a range of technical, entrepreneurial and technological skills whilst also being able to work effectively alongside others as part of a creative team (van Laar et al. 2019; Bilton 2020). Indeed, creative collaboration is a trademark of professional creative practice, whereby the interactive cycle of feedback, reflection and integration with colleagues and clients provides opportunities to assess ‘work in progress’, stimulate creativity and develop novel project outcomes (Sawyer 2021), and is thus an essential skill that digital media graduates must learn to successfully navigate the workplace.

Digital media educators have traditionally relied on the use of authentic project-based learning experiences to develop students’ collaborative capabilities (Fleischmann and Hutchison 2012; Miceli and Zeeng 2017). In face-to-face settings, these experiences often occur in physical studio environments (Shreeve, Wareing, and Drew 2008) that deliver ‘values, resources, objects, space, time, situations and a signature pedagogy enriched by active and creative modes of experiential learning and practice’ (Marshalsey and Sclater 2020, 827), which enables students to work collaboratively on projects with open-ended, real-world problems (McCarthy and de Almeida 2002) and engage in real-time, interactive dialogue throughout the creative process. Educators provide regular feedback, both formally and informally, supporting students to practice and improve their creative skills in a way that mirrors industry practice (Sawyer 2017). This ongoing cycle of feedback has been central to teaching practice in art, media and design education for more than 60 years and is seen as a positive and critical element in the students’ learning process (Blair 2007).

However, as online learning becomes more commonplace in higher education, digital media educators are being increasingly challenged to deliver these authentic and collaborative learning experiences in asynchronous online environments where students study in their own time and real-time discussions with educators occur infrequently, if at all (Fleischmann 2019). Without the benefit of a studio setting, students are deprived of physical studio-based opportunities to explore, create, share and reflect together on course material and creative projects (Gabaree et al. 2020). As such, online educators are urgently seeking ways to provide digital media students with the kind of authentic, collaborative experiences they would obtain in studio settings; however, few studies to date have investigated pedagogical or technological approaches that can be used to facilitate this (Fleischmann 2020; Marshalsey and Sclater 2020).

Feedback practices as a form of authentic learning

A potential solution to this problem lies in the wealth of research outside of digital media which has explored the use of feedback as an effective form of authentic learning (Dawson et al. 2019; Dawson, Carless and Lee 2021). Feedback can be either summative or formative: summative feedback is ‘used to check learning at the end of a teaching episode’ (Naylor et al. 2014, 4) and is usually expressed as a final mark or grade, while formative feedback is ‘information communicated to the learner that is intended to modify thinking or behaviour to improve learning’ (Kinchin 2016, 107). Formative feedback adds value by ‘giving students information to improve learning and allowing them opportunities to show this improvement’ (Espasa et al. 2018, 502) and it opens up opportunities for teacher-student dialogue interactions that can support student confidence (O’Shea and Delahunty 2018). Unlike summative feedback which offers limited opportunities for discussion (Carless 2013), cycles of formative feedback are designed to encourage learners to engage in ‘dialogue around learning’ (Steen-Utheim and Wittek 2017, 19). By enabling and encouraging dialogue, formative feedback supports students’ engagement and connection (Price et al. 2010), but importantly, also offers the potential to support students in learning how to collaborate effectively in a way that resembles their future workplace (Winstone et al. 2022a).

To be authentic, Dawson, Carless, and Pui Wah Lee (2021) argue that feedback needs to realistically represent: 1) the social context (interactivity between the provider and receiver of feedback) in which feedback in the discipline takes place; 2) the physical context for discipline-specific feedback which includes the materials and modalities of feedback – such as via industry-relevant technologies – and finally; 3) the time constraints relevant for feedback in the discipline. When these criteria are met, authentic feedback can support learners to actively construct knowledge, apply critical judgement, and develop transferable profession-relevant skills by mirroring the types of interactions and dialogue they will experience with colleagues and clients in the workplace.

To support digital media students to engage in creative collaboration, it is therefore integral that the feedback they receive mirrors the ‘work in progress’ discussions found within the creative workplace. In one of the only studies to examine how authentic feedback can be provided for digital media students online, Miceli and Zeeng (2017) implemented a ‘multi-stage feedback structure, grounded in authentic assessment’ (S1251) within face-to-face and online photography and typography courses. The authors found that by facilitating ‘meaningful dialogue that questions, explains and reinforces research, theory and practice to develop a deep understanding across all aspects of the design process’ (S1251), students expressed greater satisfaction and engagement with the feedback. While the study highlighted the potential importance of formative feedback discussions within online digital media courses, it did not consider how such interactions might be adapted in asynchronous learning environments, or to what extent this practice supported students’ collaborative capabilities.

Facilitating authentic feedback in online learning environments

Despite the lack of extant research, industry-relevant information and communication technologies (ICTs) could offer a potential route for delivering authentic feedback experiences online. In industry, digital media project problems are often managed using online teamwork software which allows opportunities for ongoing communication, reflection and collaborative reasoning between colleagues. In digital media education, ICT tools have been shown to support interaction, active learning and social engagement (Fleischmann 2014) and deliver student experiences that are ‘relevant and current and embrace the development of professional capability in the digital world’ (Bridgstock 2016, 312). Web 2.0 technologies, like wikis and blogs, social networking sites and image and video hosting sites like Flicker, Padlet and YouTube, offer opportunities to maximise interactive studio-like conversations between students and educators (Pak and Verbeke 2012) through the embedding of dialogue and feedback into learning management systems. The social dimension of Web 2.0 tools would seem to provide opportunities to deliver authentic creative collaboration feedback learning approaches, yet few studies have considered how digital media discipline-specific feedback can be facilitated in asynchronous online environments or to what extent this feedback might support the development of students’ collaborative skills. This study therefore aims to address this sizeable gap in the extant literature by documenting the implementation of a technology-facilitated formative feedback process into an online digital media course and examining its impact on students’ collaborative capabilities.

Method

The digital media course within which the present research is situated is undertaken by students at the end of their first year of a Bachelor of Digital Media – an online degree that has been designed and developed specifically for asynchronous online learning. The ten-week course is the first of three capstone project courses where students apply digital media skills and design thinking to deliver a self-identified project. In its original format, the course attempted to provide opportunities for students to collaborate and creatively discuss their projects with teachers through course forums or one-on-one email or zoom conversations, but over three years of two course deliveries per year students did not engage with formative feedback provided by the teaching team and consequently performed poorly in assessment submissions. An extensive review conducted using the ADDIE (analyse, design, develop, implement and evaluate) model of instructional design (Kurt 2017), noted the students’ poor engagement with the design thinking - a human-centred design approach used to find desirable solutions for complex problems (Wrigley, Mosely, and Tomitsch 2018) - learning activities and any feedback and concluded that the course failed to provide an authentic, industry relevant experience, particularly in regard to developing students’ creative collaboration capabilities.

The course re-design

In response to the review, the course was redesigned and restructured around a formative feedback process which provided authentic, discipline-specific feedback to support assessment outcomes and develop students’ creative collaboration capabilities. Described as ‘work in progress’ feedback to highlight the authenticity of the process, the formative feedback was embedded throughout the course in the following ways.

Firstly, the assessment method was reconfigured using the backward design framework to create three equally weighted assessments spread across the design thinking process – a creative brief, experiments and a final project outcome – to replace an assessment approach that was heavily weighted towards the final project (see Table 1). Supplementary to the three assessments, a further 10% weighting was allocated towards students’ engagement with the formative feedback process, which required them to post their ‘work in progress’ to their own individual Padlet at least once a week and provide a final reflection on their experience of the formative feedback process.

Table 1. Assessments before and after the course redesign.

Assessments	Before re-design		After re-design
	Description	Weighting	Description	Weighting
Assessment 1	Mood Board and Writing Brief	40%	Creative Brief	30%
Assessment 2	Experiments	20%	Experiments	30%
Assessment 3	Creative Artefact	40%	Creative Artefact	30%
Assessment 4			Work In Progress Weekly Submissions and Final Reflection	10%

Secondly, to facilitate the shift in emphasis from summative to formative feedback, individual Padlets were created for each student to facilitate interactive feedback dialogue between the student and the teaching team and encourage engagement with the design thinking process. Padlet was chosen because its sharing, writing and viewing functionality have been shown to support student engagement and encourage collaboration and conversation (Garnham and Betts 2018), two elements which are central to effective formative feedback (Deni and Arifin 2019). The functions it offers are similar to commercially focussed platforms used within industry, such as Miro or Mural. From a practical perspective, Padlet was also chosen because it was free to use due to an existing institutional license, could be easily embedded within the learning management system (LMS), and offered a range of privacy settings and data analytics.

Every student was provided with their own individual Padlet that could be accessed at any time by either the student or the teaching team through the LMS. The teaching team consisted of two experienced online educators with extensive digital media project industry experience. In providing feedback, the teaching team took on the role of a creative team colleague, engaging students in dialogue about creative options in order to replicate the creative interactions they had experienced working in industry. Feedback was not judgemental or informed purely by assessment criteria, but rather provided opinions or suggestions to encourage creativity and alternative thinking, thereby mirroring the types of conversations that occur within the creative workplace.

Both members of the teaching team were responsible for providing feedback, which required students’ Padlets to be accessed daily, and posts responded to in a timely manner. Through Padlet’s digital whiteboard functionality, the teaching team were able to provide an interactive and ongoing feedback dialogue which was facilitated through the sharing of images, links, videos, audio and text about creative options, industry examples and additional resources specific to each student’s individual project. Figure 1 presents an example of the frequency and type of interactions that occurred over the duration of the course. Each post presents either an idea, an industry example or a piece of ‘work-in-progress’ that the student posted to their Padlet whiteboard. The number of total posts on students’ Padlets varied, ranging from a low of just 39 posts for one student through to 207 across the ten weeks of the course for another.

Figure 1. Student Padlet wall exemplar.

Figure 2 presents an example of an individual post and is illustrative of the cycle of feedback that occurred between students and teaching team members, whereby feedback would be provided by a member of the teaching team and used by students to guide their work or ideas. This process was reflective of the casual yet constructive conversations that occur within the creative workplace, offering suggestions or ideas rather than judgements on students’ progress. In addition, these conversations provided a visual documentation of students’ engagement with the design thinking process, showcasing how their final project had emerged and developed during the course, guided through creative collaboration.

Figure 2. Individual post exemplar from student Padlet (Figure 1).

Thirdly, the assessments were re-designed to ensure they prepared students for professional practice (Villarroel et al. 2018) by replicating real-world challenges and standards of performance. The choice of potential student projects was limited to the skills taught in pre-requisite courses and strict parameters placed on the four options – a video, a poster design, a social media campaign or a website design - to flag creative collaboration in design thinking as the key course learning outcome. Without these project parameters students had attempted overly ambitious projects that required teaching staff to provide technical feedback on skills, thereby significantly reducing the time and emphasis placed on the process of creative collaboration.

Finally, detailed explanation about the value and role of the authentic formative feedback process was added throughout the course learning materials to encourage students to share their ‘work in progress’ on their Padlet and engage in dialogue with the teaching team to identify strengths and weaknesses, reflect on, review and adjust their work in order to deliver high quality and industry standard project outcomes. To mirror whole of team creative work practices, all student and teaching team communication (unless personal or intended for the whole cohort) was channelled through the individual Padlets.

Research design

Across two offerings in 2021, a total of 45 students enrolled in and completed the course. Qualitative action research was undertaken using email and phone interviews to explore the impact of formative, ‘work in progress’ feedback on students’ engagement and learning outcomes. In particular, the research aimed to identify whether, and to what extent, the formative feedback process supported students in developing their creative collaboration capabilities.

Data collection and analysis

Student perspectives on the ‘work in progress’ feedback were collected through pre and post-teaching email interviews sent to all participants enrolled in the course. While face-to-face interviews are the most common means of data collection in qualitative research email was chosen because students were accustomed to communicating asynchronously online, therefore maximising the potential for a good response rate (Fritz and Vandermause 2018). The email interviews used a series of short, close-ended questions which asked students about their prior experiences of formative feedback, their expectations and, upon completion of the course, their experience of the process. In total, 22 of the 45 students on the course responded to the email interviews.

In addition to the email interviews, two semi-structured interviews were conducted at the end of the course to provide a more detailed examination of the participants’ experience of the formative feedback process, including their views on how it had impacted their engagement and learning outcomes. An interview protocol was established according to Jacob and Furgerson (2012). Interviews were conducted via phone, recorded and then transcribed word-for-word using Otter.ai to generate the qualitative data for analysis that was then entered into NVivo 1.2.

Thematic analysis of the qualitative data provided an effective method for ‘identifying and analysing patterns in the qualitative data’ (Braun and Clarke 2013a, 120) and, using approaches drawn from Braun and Clarke (2013b), a sample of transcripts were read, then coded individually by each researcher, revealing a high degree of inter-rater reliability. From this a thematic coding framework was developed and used to analyse the remaining transcripts. Ethical approval for this research was obtained from the institutional Higher Education Research Committee (Protocol No: 204058) and all participants provided informed consent prior to taking part.

Results

The Padlet provided a place to ask questions, get feedback, and push my work further than ever before. It was an opportunity to expand my learning and gain insight into how professional workplaces in the creative industry can work.

Overall, students indicated that the re-design of the course, which placed the students at the centre of an authentic formative feedback process, provided an industry relevant experience which enabled them to develop their creative collaboration capabilities and practice valuable professional skills. In particular, three aspects of the formative feedback process were identified as playing a critical role in supporting students’ creative collaboration: the timely and personal nature of the feedback; the industry knowledge of the feedback providers and the industry relevance and interactivity of Padlet.

Providing timely and personalised feedback

Embedding formative feedback across all aspects of the course encouraged students to engage with the creative process, and the way in which this feedback was delivered played a critical role in sparking their creative collaboration.

The formative feedback strongly supported my engagement. I usually find it difficult to break down big assessments, however the Padlet especially held me accountable for completing weekly tasks. This is often difficult with online learning - outside of a physical classroom there are many distractions, especially when working from home. Engaging with the teachers on a weekly basis made me feel confident to reach out, ask questions and seek clarification.

The regularity of the ‘work in progress’ formative feedback encouraged students to initiate discussions with teachers, thereby fostering a back-and-forth dialogue which evolved over time and spanned all stages of the design thinking process. From a course outcome perspective this is important because students who are motivated to engage with learning achieve higher levels of learning performance (Blasco-Arcas et al. 2013); however, the increased engagement with the design thinking process also ensured that students were participating in authentic interactions which mirrored ‘work-in-progress’ workplace practice.

Embedding the requirement to engage with feedback regularly - at least one feedback discussion per week – within the assessments pushed students to openly discuss the creative elements of their projects. To fulfil the weekly submission requirement, students were required to adjust their behaviour to purposefully participate in the feedback process:

l knew that I needed to sit down and log onto the Padlet and just post something, so I had something out there. So, I think it was actually really good in forcing me and holding me accountable for doing the weekly work.

This requirement also encouraged students who had otherwise felt uncomfortable engaging in constructive dialogue to take a more active role in their learning:

The other class I was doing at the same time I found myself at one time I went to go find the Padlet for that course to go post a question and because we didn’t have that feedback process, I never ended up asking that question because I didn’t want to post it to the forum.

Students suggested that the regularity of the feedback allowed them to engage with and respond when it suited them. The constant availability and easy access was seen by one student as ‘highly supportive and motivated me to push on and create results that I was really pleased with – knowing that the teaching team was always there to help and provide their thoughts made the world of difference’.

By conducting all feedback discussions through Padlet and having the whole teaching team involved in these discussions, communications between students and staff were streamlined, which appeared to increase the willingness of students to share and discuss their work. As one student expressed ‘I went from someone who never posts a public question in a forum or anything, to every week I just posted heaps even if I was just thinking about something’, while another commented ‘it (the Padlet) exponentially increased the amount that I was engaging or asking questions that I wouldn’t usually ask’. While some students engaged with the process straight away, others required a few weeks to feel comfortable sharing ‘unfinished work’:

It did take me sometime to be comfortable posting my work in progress. I felt more comfortable with doing it by like week four or five.

At first it was really hard to adjust to posting my work in progress onto the Padlet but once I figured out how it worked and how the feedback would be provided and received it became a lot easier.

Implementing timely feedback processes that facilitate ongoing dialogue across the whole learning process has been found to support students in their ability to act on feedback (Dawson et al. 2019; Winstone and Boud 2022), and this was supported by the data which showed that students increasingly incorporated the feedback they received into their assessments as they progressed through the design process:

Having to submit regular updates on your progress motivates you to make sure you do each step of the course and better understand each lecture or activity which then helps you to complete your assessments with more confidence.

The personalised nature of the feedback discussions, which were specific to each student’s individual project, were seen as being highly authentic and motivated students to engage with the feedback and integrate it into their creative projects:

I found the strengths of this kind of feedback was how efficient, thorough and personal the feedback was. It was also good that I was receiving regular feedback as I went along, so I would be able to make small changes if I had to, rather than finding out something was wrong later on and having to undo huge amounts of work.

Utilising industry knowledge to provide authentic feedback

At the beginning it was made clear that the feedback was to replicate the real-life industry of how it works. And to me I think I felt more encouraged to engage with the feedback.

Students recognised that through participating in authentic feedback processes which resembled the interaction and dialogue of the workplace, they were being supported in gaining industry-relevant experience of creative collaboration. The authentic feedback, delivered in simulated style of collaboration that would take place within an industry project team, was described as making the overall course experience more dynamic and engaging:

To get feedback from an expert in the area is a huge benefit. My feeling is the feedback I receive is valid and coming from an expert.

‘It felt like the feedback I was getting was from the industry that my project was in. That I was receiving feedback from someone who had thought about it from the field I was doing my project in.’

Supporting learners to understand how to engage with discipline-specific feedback helps them to develop skills that they will need to engage more effectively in work environments (Winstone, Balloo, and Carless 2022b), which, in this course, included the teaching team taking the role of creative team colleague. While this was a different feedback process to what they were used to, students suggested that the formative feedback discussions conducted through the Padlet ‘felt real’ and encouraged them to regularly check-in with the comments and suggestions and engage with each step of the design process.

The teaching team were established as industry specialists at the beginning of the course and applied industry standard language and expectations in their creative conversations with students. It did take time for students to adjust to the process and the different tone of conversations with the teaching team:

It was daunting at first but the way that the feedback was given was just so constructive it didn’t feel like it was like an attack on my work or anything. And it was like I genuinely felt like the teaching team was there to help me all the way.

Students increasingly adjusted to the process, demonstrating a shift in their thinking and willingness to engage with the feedback:

It felt like it simulated the style of collaboration that would take place within an industry project, which made the overall course more dynamic and engaging.

One of the intentions of the feedback approach was to try and mirror some of the elements of studio-based teaching, which is a cornerstone of face-to-face creative course design. Responses suggested that, through the regular feedback, students were given the opportunity to practice and improve their skills and knowledge in a way that bridged learning and digital media design practice (Park 2011). A key element of this mirroring of professional practice was the genuine authenticity of the feedback discussions, which were designed to push the students to question their design production options. The collaborative approach to feedback discussions in the Padlet allowed students to explore, discuss, and meaningfully construct concepts and relationships in contexts that mirrored real-world problems and projects, and the students embraced the opportunity:

This is the most enjoyable course I had so far. I think the main thing was because I knew it was a step closer to replicating the real world and that’s what excited me about doing the course.

Using Padlet as an interactive, industry-relevant technology

The capacity of technology to facilitate the feedback process of action and reflection is an important consideration for online learning environments (Fleischmann 2014), and the student experience of formative feedback using Padlet in this course showed the students did gain the confidence to invest in the creative process and push themselves towards self-reflection and positive learning outcomes. Padlet has previously been shown to engage students in collaborative learning in a fun, meaningful way (Payne 2019), which is critical in enhancing learning development (Gill-Simmen 2021), and so in this course the formative feedback using Padlet was a core learning activity through which all discussions about the creative elements of the students’ individual projects were channelled. From a teaching and learning perspective the re-design provided the opportunity for consistent visual and dialogic feedback that the teaching team felt supported students to self-regulate their time and effort across every stage of the creative process, and mirror the ongoing collaborative discussions that occur in industry as digital media teams work on achieving project outcomes. The implementation of ongoing creative formative feedback using the Padlet to mirror industry teamwork software was a significant change in learning approach for these students. Students noted how different the process was for them compared to other courses and how they were encouraged to engage in creative collaboration:

The Padlet provided a place to ask questions, get feedback and push my work further than ever before. It was an opportunity to expand my learning and gain insight into how professional workplaces in the creative industry can work.

Using industry-relevant ICTs encouraged students to act on the feedback they received as a part of their regular practice:

I found that as soon as I did sit down and open it up and go to write a post, I would see feedback and then I would then start actually working on it and force myself to improve my work.

Students generally found Padlet to be simple and engaging to use and, in particular, they noted that Padlet made following conversations and responding to dialogue about their project creative elements easier and more enjoyable than in a course forum, due to the content being more visually appealing and easier to access:

Using Padlet is a whole lot more creative that just typing out a post. Getting on the Padlet just felt more involved. A bit like a scrapbook full of ideas that was overall creative.

They appreciated that each thread was visible in one place, and that they were not required to go in and out of forums to engage with other topics. Moreover, students seemed to appreciate the ease with which they were able to embed media into their posts and expressed that the ongoing availability of the content created also fostered reiterative learning (Gill-Simmen 2021) and served as a useful repository for preparing for the final project:

I felt with this course that the Padlet was really appropriate because it felt more creative than just typing out a forum post and adding a picture or something. It actually felt like I was sticking things onto a cork board or writing things creatively up on a white board that I could show and then get feedback on.

Research that informed the study also suggested that feedback can have a powerful impact on individuals’ creative performance (George and Zhou 2001) and this was certainly the experience of many students who responded positively to the visual and creative process of posting and responding through the Padlet. For some students, the Padlet was also seen as a safe space through which they could share and discuss their ideas which in turn built their confidence:

I am someone who does not like to reach out and ask for help (especially publicly) so posting on forums is often a no-go for me. However, the formative feedback in the Padlet was amazing as it was one on one and did not feel formal.

Engaging with the teachers on a weekly basis made me feel confident to reach out, ask questions and seek clarification.

Students also expressed that having all the feedback discussions in one space – the Padlet – and having the whole teaching team involved streamlined communications and kept everyone connected and supported:

I really liked that I didn’t have to be online at a certain time to like coordinate with the online tutor. I could just post something leave it there and check back in every now and then to see if I had received feedback. And I felt that that was also really helpful later on in my project and stuff where I could go back, and the feedback was all there.

Discussion

The growth of online learning has profoundly increased students’ access and opportunities in higher education, yet, it has also challenged digital media educators to develop innovative and engaging learning experiences that equip students with both discipline-specific knowledge and the technical, entrepreneurial and technological skills needed to thrive in the contemporary creative workplace. Until now, research has offered few options for online digital media educators searching for pedagogical alternatives to the engaging and authentic learning experiences facilitated in tried-and-trusted face-to-face studio environments. The present study addresses this significant gap in the extant research, finding that embedding ‘work in progress’ formative feedback into the delivery of a first-year digital media project course provided an authentic and engaging learning experience which encouraged students to participate in collaborative creative discussions about their projects.

Effective online feedback requires involving students actively in the generation, processing and response to feedback information (Dawson, Carless, and Pui Wah Lee 2021), and data from this study shows that the holistic way in which formative feedback was provided offered an authentic, industry relevant experience through which students developed their content knowledge and their collaborative capabilities. In particular, the findings suggested that the timely and personal nature of the feedback supported student engagement across the whole creative process, while the industry-derived knowledge of the feedback providers built the students’ confidence to engage with the discipline-specific feedback. Disentangling the summative and formative feedback processes, both conceptually and practically, clarified the unique purposes of each and encouraged the students to reflect and act on the formative feedback which, in turn, resulted in significantly improved assessment outcomes. The interactivity and usability of Padlet was also integral to the success of the approach, providing an effective and convenient way to engage in formative discussions which boosted student creativity and gave them the confidence to experiment and collaborate.

However, not all pedagogical considerations were welcomed by students and some elements of the course design were challenging to implement and need consideration for future course deliveries. One of the key challenges is the blurring of the lines between the teaching team as ‘markers’ in the summative feedback process and the teaching team as ‘creative team colleagues’ in the formative feedback process. The retrospective emphasis and academic ‘jargon’ that is often included in summative feedback comments (Winstone et al. 2017) is at odds with the authentic creative discussions the industry-focussed teaching team were aiming to facilitate in the Padlet. It will be essential in future deliveries to more clearly distinguish between summative assessment feedback, which aligns with rubrics and marking criteria, and formative ‘work in progress’ feedback, which offers an ongoing, interactive and supportive discussion which encourages students to engage with, and act on, the developmental feedback information prior to their assessment submissions. A clearer distinction between the summative and formative feedback process using different timeframes, platforms and rhetorical approaches will potentially prevent grading concerns distracting students from engaging with potentially useful feedback information and learning how creative collaboration can both support them to be self-regulated learners and prepare them for professional practice.

Encouraging some students to engage with the weekly ‘work in progress’ feedback process was also challenging at times so the teaching team regularly posted prompts for students to share their ideas or work. This process will be expanded to include a range of additional resources, images and graphics to grab the students’ attention and further encourage their engagement. It is also hoped that there will be a shift from expecting and waiting for untimely summative feedback on assessments, to engaging in ongoing creative collaboration about their projects, as students move through the three capstone project courses in the program and become more familiar with the ‘work in progress’ feedback. Having completed the first capstone project course with the authentic formative feedback positioned at the heart, students should be more comfortable sharing and discussing their ‘work in progress’ in the second- and third-year courses where the intention is to bring opportunities for feedback from peers, potential clients and industry mentors into their individual Padlets.

The authority of the teaching team providing ‘work in progress’ feedback having up-to-date industry knowledge is also essential to ensuring the authenticity of the process so careful consideration needs to be given to the staff contracted to teach this course. Finding academics with knowledge of online pedagogy and digital media industry experience is challenging but without this, the perceived authenticity of the creative collaboration diminishes. Different layouts and privacy settings on Padlet may also help to both simplify and enhance the feedback dialogue process that some students found challenging, and the addition of student exemplars showing the value and opportunity of creative collaboration in the Padlet for both their assessment outcomes and professional practice capabilities, should also further encourage student engagement.

The capacity of the technology chosen to facilitate the feedback process of action and reflection (Fleischmann 2014) in future course deliveries is also an important consideration. Padlet is visually engaging, especially if contributions incorporate images or are accompanied by video or website links, and it allows for a specific mode of conversation and feedback dialogue that is written and asynchronous but close to real-time. Other Web 2.0 tools, such as social networking sites, blogs and wikis, have been shown to improve communication, problem solving and self-regulation skills (Brezeanu and Ianos 2020), and contribute to positive learning experiences (Boud and Molloy 2013; McCarthy 2019). However, further investigation is required to better understand how these technologies can be incorporated into learning activities, and how they are perceived by students or teachers. Where Padlet functions well is in providing a visual log of students’ creative thinking across the design process, documenting the journey from an idea to a product. This is particularly relevant when considering how artificial intelligence image generators such as DALL.E have placed a spotlight on issues of academic integrity and copyright. While such programs allow digital media students to produce creative artefacts within a matter of seconds, Padlet captures their learning journey, documenting their engagement with the learning process, thereby ensuring that copyright and academic integrity principles are being suitably adhered to.

Conclusion

This study has shown that authentic, formative feedback can be an effective tool in supporting the creative collaboration capabilities of online digital media students. However, as a pedagogic approach, students need both time and encouragement to shift their understanding of the timing, value and purpose of the feedback they receive. Placing greater emphasis on the developmental function of the ‘work in progress’ feedback can support the collation and synthesis of feedback (Clarke and Boud 2018; Winstone, Mathlin, and Nash 2019), and enable students to track their development and identify what they need to address in future work (Winstone and Boud 2022). Emphasising the ongoing curation and tracking of feedback can also help students recognise the influence feedback processes have on key learning outcomes such as confidence, skills, self-concept and employability (Winstone, Mathlin, and Nash 2019). Students also need to recognise that such feedback is authentic and provided within a safe space, and this security is essential in encouraging them to experiment and share in order to foster their capacity for creative collaboration.

While this study focuses specifically on digital media students, the professional learning challenges that they face are highly relevant to other types of knowledge workers and the learnings from this, and future research, can potentially be applied to a range of disciplines and courses where creative collaboration is a valued professional skill. As this study shows, ‘work in progress’ creative collaboration facilitated through Padlet offers an alternative and effective online form of studio pedagogy which supports students’ collaborative skills. It has the potential to serve as a model for teaching and learning in a range of disciplines where educators want to design creative online learning experiences where teamwork and project work are undertaken to support students to be innovative, collaborative and prepared for the workplace.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katrina McLachlan

Katrina McLachlan is a lecturer responsible for leading the development and delivery of online teaching in media and creative programs at UniSA Online. As an industry immersed academic she is focussed on authentic learning experiences and is undertaking a PhD looking at developing authentic, industry relevant curricula in digital media and journalism education.

Neil Tippett

Dr Neil Tippett is a lecturer and a member of the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion at the University of South Australia. He is currently as a chief investigator on two Australian Research Council Discovery Projects. His research focuses on student behaviour, wellbeing, early career teachers and authentic learning.