Investigating soft skills development through peer reviews assessments in an entrepreneurship course

In this paper we present an approach to study the development of soft skills in tertiary education students, which are seen as critical skills for active citizenship, personal fulfilment and employability in a knowledge-driven society. We developed an online learning setting in which students practice and gain knowledge on Innovation and Entrepreneurship themes, and we present an evaluation of peer review assignments submitted by students participating in an entrepreneurship course called "Business Development Lab", understanding different learner types that emerged, the similarities between their original submissions, submissions reviewed and reviews they provided, and we try to understand how verbose students were in their reviews and assignments. We found that the initial results are satisfying, bringing into light new future directions of research on how soft skills can be studied in online environments. This study contributes to the ongoing debate on how to understand and visualize data coming from online courses in understanding development of soft skills and competences.