From Pedagogy to Politeness: Aspects Regarding Feedback in Online Learning Context

The online learning environment has challenged the educational relationships over the last years. The medical safety has hidden us behind some monitors, devices or platforms that allowed us to continue our studies and our professional activities. From faces with or without associated names, we turned into names that accompany empty icons on the wall. Most often, we had to keep our cameras off. When we turned them on and shared our faces with the audience, we offered and received feedback much easier. The feedback has an important role in any human communication. More than that, in the educational field, the feedback contributes to the adjustments of the teaching – learning – evaluating process. On the positive side, the teacher gives feedback in order to reinforce the appropriate learning behaviour of the student and the student offers feedback to ensure the proper adjustment of the teaching behaviour. The pattern of giving and receiving feedback is simple and visible in all face-to-face communication that develops an educational activity. What happens in the online mediated education? What happens when faces see no faces? Our study investigates the feedback from the perspective of the online mediated educational relationships. Thus, we analyzed the responses of the students to some seminar tasks regarding the use of educational platforms and the role of feedback in the learning process. The target population consisted in 135 students enrolled in the certification program for teaching career. Our findings show that feedback as reinforcement communicative behaviour upgrades the politeness strategy and feedback as a pedagogical principle helps to replace the missing face-to-face interaction in online mediated learning.