Hi, Eric.
I'm an eLearning Administrator and I regularly complete reviews on Review 360, and I am also interested in the topic of how to signify my "approval" on reviews. In the interest of clarity for this important topic, let me say that marking a review as "Completed" and expressing an approval status are not necessarily the same thing. Every time I complete a review, I must instruct developers by writing one of the following as a comment to facilitate the approval process.
1. Approved: The content is approved. No changes are required.
2. Approved with changes: Apply changes in the feedback. There is no need for further review.
3. Update and resubmit: Apply changes in the feedback and request a new review.
I can see the benefit of having the option to engage an "Approved" button which then reveals an approval comment for further instructions, after which an approval notification is sent. I will see if I can request that feature. In the meantime, I wanted to express my agreement with the original post.
I suppose the way approval was originally conceived was that marking "Complete" is meant to express approval with no further changes, that comments would flow until completion ends the process, signifying approval. Conceptually, this could work, but it lacks a way to make approval comments distinctive from any other comment.
My supervisors and department heads often forget to make their approval status known in their comments, and I often must intervene in the process to get explicit approval and further instructions. That is the essence of the problem: For users like my company, approval needs to be explicit, detailed, highly visible, and easy. Your thoughts?