The Packback team loves our feature, Real-Time Coaching, to shorten the feedback loop and deliver coaching when it matters most; while a student is still writing their post.
Do you remember the last time you turned in an essay for a class? Long hours poring over research, writing out your thoughts and perhaps fiddling with the margins to hit the page count followed by handing those precious pages into your professor. A few days later, your paper was handed back full of notes, feedback, and a circled grade.
Those one-on-one thoughts from your professor probably allowed you to suddenly see dozens of areas where you could have improved. But unfortunately, you didn’t receive that feedback until after your essay already submitted, long after improvements could be made that might have changed the final outcome of the paper.
But what if you could have received feedback while you were writing, instead of after that assignment was submitted?
In the traditional classroom, feedback shows a student how they failed. What might happen if feedback was used to guarantee success instead?
Packback’s Real-Time Coaching turns the process of writing on Packback into a collaborative, proactive mentoring process. This allows students to have the opportunity to immediately learn from and apply feedback to craft their best question or answer.
Feedback, when it matters most
While a professor can only in be in one place at a time (and eventually has to sleep!), Packback’s Real-Time Coaching can be there to guide every Packback user any time of day or night while they are posting a question or answer.
Professors spend more than 10% of their time on grading and course administration, but even with such a large chunk of time being allocated to reviewing work, there is no way to guarantee or track that their feedback is being read or used.
And for students, that professor feedback is often received after a student has completed a project, long after they could make changes that improved their outcome. As a result, that critically important professor feedback can feel more like scolding than support, since there is often no way to “try again” on that same assignment.
The coaching on the Packback platform occurs while a student is still typing their post, while there is still time to make changes and apply that feedback. Real-Time Coaching does not diminish the importance of professor feedback at all. Instead, it allows professors to focus their feedback on big-picture takeaways of how to take a post even further next time, rather than correcting the basics.
See tips while typing
With the introduction of Real-Time Coaching, the process of asking a question or writing a response becomes interactive and in-the-moment, providing feedback that responds to the content of the question or answer while it is being written. From now on, anyone posting a question or answer on Packback Questions will receive specific, actionable feedback based on what they type.
Check it out in action on the “Ask a New Question” page:
As you type a question, you’ll receive a tip to be sure to phrase your question properly and include a question mark, to add a description to your question, and to keep your question title concise for easy reading and clarity.
When typing a question description, you’ll receive tips to include an image or video to add context to your post and to format your post for legibility after exceeding 50 words.
And check it out on the “Add a Response” page:
While adding a response, you’ll receive messages encouraging a longer response (which is correlated to higher engagement for both the writer and the reader), tips to include examples, images and videos and even a message when your post has reached the length and quality of other top responses on the Packback Questions platform.
Elevating questions and responses
The ultimate goal of Packback’s Real-Time Coaching is to equip every Packback user with the tools and knowledge about how to ask a truly great question and how to develop the most insightful response on their own. Packback has been investing much of our team’s time and energy into training the curious minds that use our platform about the importance of asking great questions, and how to make slight tweaks to a question to elicit better, more unique responses.
To learn more about our philosophy and why we believe in the importance of great questions, watch our cofounder Jessica Tenuta’s TEDx Talk, “The world is changed by those brave enough to question it“.
