 It seems that in my role as head of the School of Education at the University of Queensland, I learned something new every day. But how do I really know that I've learned something? Let me see. Last week I was at a conference in Hamburg, Germany, and I can say that I learned to use the train system. I knew I'd learnt this because I could get on a train and get to my destination without making a mistake and getting lost. On the first day, I was with a colleague who'd been to Hamburg before. But in this case, we didn't know which direction we needed to go. We thought we'll just get on a train, and if we go in the wrong direction, we can just get off and catch a train back the other way. We had to question our strategy and test to see if we were right. You know, deep learning is a little bit like my train journey. I knew I was on the right path on my journey when I received feedback on what I was doing. So what exactly is feedback? Feedback is something that tells you if you're on the right track or not. With surface learning, you're not really on a path to anywhere. There are no connections to anything. There are no chains of reasoning being built. Just a bunch of unconnected stuff that leaves you where you are, not where you're going. Deep learning, however, is connected ideas and reasoning that moves you to something new. And when you're moving somewhere, you need to know, am I going in a productive direction or not? You constantly need to check for yourself, like when you're on the train, and ask, how am I travelling? What do I need to do next to get to where I'm going? In a nutshell, feedback is information provided on the performance or understanding of a task, which can then be used to improve this performance or understanding. Feedback helps to close the gap between actual performance and intended performance. There are a multitude of different types of feedback, and we encounter many of these in our everyday lives. Feedback can come from a diverse variety of sources as well. Feedback doesn't need to be formal. In fact, some feedback is very informal, and we hardly recognise it for what it is. Have you ever put your automatic teller machine card in to withdraw money, only to have it spat back out at you? This is a machine telling you you've done it the wrong way. We can either keep doing the same thing and getting the same result, or try another strategy. Feedback has a powerful influence on learning, and in particular on deep engagement with content. If we would like our students to have a full understanding of a task and gain skills they can use in the future and transfer to other tasks, then effective feedback on learning is crucial.