Providing peer feedback may assist learners’ understanding of quality as learners compare their own and peers’ work. Through such a process, learners can generate ‘inner feedback’ that can be applied to understanding or future work (Nicol & McCallum, 2021; Nicol & Selvaratnam, 2021). Complementing peer feedback processes, technology-mediated feedback environments can provide further opportunities for learning through comparisons by providing access to an expanded range of level-appropriate comparators. Such environments can, for example, facilitate access to peers’ drafts, feedback comments, teacher feedback, and examples of how others negotiate the dialogic peer/teacher feedback uptake process. This can all be used, in theory, to generate inner feedback (Wood, 2021). Through inductive analysis of reflective writing, surveys (N=40) and interviews (N=30) from several advanced research writing classes at a university in South Korea before and after COVID-19, this study explores student use of comparison opportunities within a Google Drive/Classroom mediated ‘open’ feedback environment. Data analysis revealed three key themes.

First, an initial explicit comparison activity in class, at the first draft stage, helped students understand the potential benefits and yielded insights into essay structure and form, complementing this, weeklong peer and teacher feedback stages further highlighted areas for improvement that learners felt had been beyond their awareness at the initial stage. Comparisons with other students’ teacher screencast feedback offered additional input which they felt would help them avoid similar mistakes and better understand the standards. Similarly, the ‘open’ feedback environment also enabled participants to locate specific, in-context examples in peers' work (or exemplars) of what they had been advised to do in feedback and model them. This helped learners overcome the substantial barrier of not knowing how to implement feedback (Winstone et al. 2017). Participants also reported learning vicariously from peers’ feedback-seeking and uptake strategies as they clarified feedback through technology-mediated or in-person dialogues with feedback providers.

Finally, viewing other students' feedback and having guided discussions with peers, helped participants feel they belonged, which appeared to help alleviate feelings of imposter syndrome as they understood that struggling to enact large amounts of critical feedback was common. The findings are significant in demonstrating that engaging in dialogic peer feedback and explicit/implicit comparison-making opportunities within a technology-mediated ‘open’ formative feedback environment can play complementary roles in supporting learner agency and uptake. Because the activities also offer workload-sustainable opportunities for providing effective formative support, the study may be of interest to workload-challenged HE practitioners.