Providing effective, high quality feedback that students engage with remains an important issue in higher education today, particularly in the context of academic language support where feedback helps socialise students to academic writing practices. Technology-enhanced feedback, such as audio and video feedback, is becoming more widely used, and as such, it is important to evaluate whether these methods help students engage with the feedback more successfully than conventional methods. While previous research has explored students’ perceptions of audio-visual feedback, this paper seeks to fill a gap in the literature by examining the impact of the audio-visual mode on undergraduate students’ engagement with feedback compared to written-only feedback. Evidence from an analysis of feedback comments (n = 1040) and corresponding revisions as well as interviews (n = 3) is used to draw conclusions about the value of providing audio-visual feedback to help students revise their writing more successfully. In line with multimedia learning theory (Mayer 2009), it is argued that the multimodal format, conversational tone, verbal explanations and personalised feel of audio-visual feedback allows for a more successful engagement with the feedback, particularly for students with a lower level of English language proficiency.

PurposeCritically, to improve and manage online learning quality (OLQUAL), higher education providers need to regularly measure OLQUAL. Hence, a reliable measure of OLQUAL in higher education from the students' perspective is indispensable. Further, as a pioneer in examining OLQUAL outcomes in the online education context, we assert that satisfaction, trust and loyalty is a global assessment that follows the evaluation of OLQUAL. A model that delineates the perceived OLQUAL and its relationship with satisfaction, trust and loyalty are currently absent. Grounded on the cognition–affective–conation framework – this study presents the indicators of perceived OLQUAL and its influence on students' satisfaction and trust which further influences their loyalty.Design/methodology/approachTo measure the OLQUAL instrument and proposed relationships – data were collected from 232 online undergraduate and postgraduate students. The results of confirmatory factor analysis measure five dimensions of perceived OLQUAL – comprising system quality, administrative quality, educational quality, transformative quality and social quality. Further, the proposed relationships were tested using structural equation modelling.FindingsThis study has successfully measured a second-order OLQUAL model on five primary quality dimensions (i.e. systems, administrative, educational, transformative and social). The findings confirm that students' satisfaction alone does not play a mediating role; rather, satisfaction and trust play a sequential mediating role between OLQUAL and loyalty.Originality/valueOur new model provides a new tool for institutions and researchers to evaluate the quality of online education programs, as well as identify their strategy in developing and providing high-quality online learning to students.