A case study on using existing technology to provide formative feedback to students from Griffith University.

For teachers working in under-resourced English as a Second Language (ESL) settings, the promise of a slick learning management system can feel pie in the sky. There’s just a teacher, a classroom of mobile phones and a determination to give students meaningful feedback anyway.

That’s the starting point for a case study by Kyan Mortazavi, a PhD candidate at Griffith University in Australia, featured in the Assessment and Feedback Case Study Compendium 2026. Rather than lobbying for new infrastructure, Mortazavi’s project asks a simpler question: what if the tools people already use every day could be quietly repurposed to do the job?

The answer, in this case, is Telegram – the messaging app more commonly associated with group chats than gradebooks. Working with a single teacher and a cohort of 20 to 30 adult learners at intermediate to upper-intermediate level, the project reimagines familiar Telegram features as the building blocks of a lightweight, informal LMS.

Channels become a stable home for learning materials and feedback prompts. Pinned messages keep task expectations visible, so students always know what’s being assessed and why. Polls, normally used for quick “yes or no” chats among friends, are repurposed as low-stakes formative quizzes, letting the teacher gauge understanding in seconds rather than marking piles of written work. Threaded replies allow students to respond in their own time, easing the pressure of live, real-time participation. Even voice notes get a pedagogical makeover, offering an alternative for learners who find writing or speaking up in class daunting.

Automated bots play a role too, but a deliberately modest one. They’re there to give instant feedback on simple quizzes, not to replace the teacher’s judgement. That distinction matters: the whole project is built on the idea that technology should support a teacher’s decision-making, not sideline it.

Indeed, at the heart of the case study is a three-part model of teacher practice: planning tasks that fit the platform’s limits, monitoring engagement through observation rather than formal analytics and regulating the approach by dropping what isn’t working and keeping what is. It’s less about mastering software and more about cultivating a kind of professional agility.

This is a project still in its early stages. There’s no hard data yet on learner outcomes. The current cycle, running over 12 weeks, is about establishing design principles rather than proving impact. But the early thinking, shaped partly by feedback at Advance HE’s Assessment and Feedback Symposium in November 2025, points towards something with legs well beyond ESL teaching. The same logic, repurposing WhatsApp polls or Microsoft Teams threads to sustain feedback where resources are thin, could plausibly transfer to STEM modules or professional development programmes anywhere.

It’s a modest, unglamorous idea, and that may be exactly its strength. Rather than waiting for better infrastructure, this project makes a case for working cleverly with what’s already in every student’s pocket.