Formative Feedback on Engineering Self-Study: Towards 1 Million Times per Year per Cohort

Timely and specific formative feedback is essential for quality education but challenging to scale for large cohorts. This paper presents Lambda Feedback, a digital platform providing automated real-time feedback to students on self-study. Deployed across multiple disciplines, it supports diverse question types, including symbolic mathematics. Teachers configure feedback without ‘coding’. Feedback is provided by an external ‘microservice’, enabling anyone in the community to develop feedback technology that can plugin to the platform. User surveys show a positive effect on learning experiences. Currently a work-in-progress, the platform provides feedback a million times annually in total. Future work will expand feedback functionality and scale to one million feedback events per cohort per year, i.e. billions per institution per year.