Elaborated Feedback as a Mechanism for Quality Assurance in Project-Based Higher Education

As project-based learning becomes increasingly integrated into higher education, the demand for new tools to monitor collaborative work has grown significantly. This article presents an approach to generating feedback based on the analysis of digital traces produced within professional collaboration tools – specifically, task trackers (e. g., Trello, Wekan) and code repositories (e.g., GitLab). The study reviews current frameworks for feedback provision and digital trace analysis, identifies the sources and structure of digital traces in project-based work, and proposes a method for extracting and processing student activity logs. Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques are applied to assess the interaction structure within teams, and an interpretive model is introduced to generate feedback based on network metrics. The empirical basis of the study consists of 253 student projects implemented between 2019 and 2023 at MIEM, National Research University Higher School of Economics. The findings demonstrate that visualizing network characteristics and role dynamics within teams significantly enhances the ability to detect key interaction patterns and atypical behaviors that may require pedagogical intervention. Integrating such mechanisms into digital learning environments offers a unique opportunity for continuous monitoring of team processes and for improving the quality management of project-based learning.