I was surprised today to find an ad on InsideHigherEd to a company called EduMetry, which offers various outsourcing services to colleges and professors, among them, a 24/7 virtual writing center, and “Virtual TA.”
Virtual TA is a program where the grading of papers, and the writing of “Rich Feedback” is outsourced.
According to “The Case for Rich Feedback,” on the EduMentry site,
One area crying out for attention is the extent of feedback students receive on their ongoing written assignments. Almost universally, assignments come back with a score or letter-grade and a few scrawls that are too brief, general, vague and or otherwise too minimal to make a difference. The student is left with little guidance on what to do differently.
The same page attributes this lack of rich feedback being given to students to a a lack of support that faculty members receive from the university.
But the solutions to that problem are smaller and fewer classes, and faculty learning how to give useful feedback, and students learning how to use that feedback.
I realize this kind of service would best appeal to those running the kinds of huge lecture classes in which “non-virtual” TAs currently do the grading and feedback writing for professors.
But the name “Virtual TA” is kind of a misnomer. They’re not virtual TAs; they’re real TAs you can’t see or visit with, who have no connection with the culture of the college or its student body.
Leaving aside the large lecture course, which I think is not a good idea pedagogically except in certain fields, I fear that this Virtual TA system might be employed in more standard college courses. And if it were, I can’t imagine it being a good idea for the professor, who won’t be reading the papers, and who won’t be learning all s/he can about the students, who themselves won’t be benefitting from the professor’s own feedback.
In response to that concern, EduMetry says (on their FAQ):
Wouldn’t you be interfering in the instructor-student relationship?
We have no direct contact with students. We are at the service of the institution and its faculty members. We provide instructors with a student-ID-scrambling utility that ensures a double-blind grading process. As former academics ourselves, we do everything possible to keep the professor in the loop (and not in the dark, as delegating grading might appear at first blush). In addition to having access to all the individual-student feedback, professors receive a summary report for the class that points out the highlights from the grading of that assignment. This report further ensures that faculty members are aware of how students did, adjust their teaching (content, pace, style, design of assignments) based on the summary feedback.
Truly rich feedback can be provided only by those who know both the subject, the students, and their work, as intimately as is possible given the circumstances.
It’s not the interference between teacher and student, mentioned by EduMentry above, that I fear.
Instead, it’s the gap between teacher and student that this creates.
I guess you might say I “mind the gap.”
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