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Feedback Request Skills: Overview

Dayne
Updated

Introduction

In this article we will walk you through the intended pedagogical purpose of Feedback Request on Skills.

Developing professional and academic skills requires feedback, but getting structured feedback on competencies like communication, collaboration, or critical thinking can be difficult to organize. Feedback Request on Skills puts students in the driver's seat: they choose the skills they want feedback on and invite reviewers, including people outside the LMS such as supervisors, industry mentors, or external stakeholders.

Unlike Feedback Request on Work, this activity does not include a submission step. Reviewers provide feedback based on their direct experience with the student's skills, rather than reviewing a specific deliverable. This makes it ideal for competency-based assessments, internship evaluations, clinical placements, and other contexts where skills are observed rather than submitted.

Here you can find our user guides for Feedback Request Skills:

 

How It Works

A typical Feedback Request on Skills activity follows these steps:

  1. The teacher sets up the activity: defining feedback criteria for specific skills (rubrics, scales, or comment-only), writing instructions for reviewers, and optionally allowing students to select which criteria they want feedback on.

  2. The student creates a feedback request: writing instructions for their reviewer and selecting the skill criteria they want reviewed.

  3. The student invites reviewers: adding reviewers by email, assigning a role (e.g., supervisor, first reader, industry mentor), and including a personal message. Reviewers do not need a FeedbackFruits account or LMS access.

  4. The reviewer provides feedback: through a clean, mobile-first interface with no login required. Reviewers see the selected criteria, give ratings and comments based on their experience with the student, and can stop and resume at any time.

  5. The student reads and reflects on the received feedback.

Because there is no submission step, the reviewer draws on their own observations and interactions with the student to provide feedback. This is the key difference from Feedback Request on Work, where the reviewer evaluates a specific deliverable.

4 - Student - activity overview no submissions no progress.png

Fig. 1: Workflow steps in the Feedback Request on Skills activity

 

Benefits of Using Feedback Request on Skills

Through implementation of Feedback Request on Skills, you can address common challenges in competency-based feedback:

  • Empower student agency: Students build metacognitive skills by identifying which competencies they want feedback on and from whom.

  • Bring in external expertise: Supervisors, industry mentors, clinical instructors, and other external stakeholders can provide feedback without needing an account or LMS access.

  • Simplify the reviewer experience: The simplified reviewer flow and no-login interface ensures external reviewers can complete their review quickly and easily, maximizing response rates.

  • Maintain teacher oversight: Teachers define the available skill criteria and configure the activity settings. Students make choices within the framework the teacher has established.

  • No submission required: Removing the submission step makes this activity faster to set up and more natural for contexts where skills are observed rather than documented.

 

 

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