[Peer Review] Respecting sections when automatically assigning peer reviews

[stelpstra]

Situation

Canvas does not respect the sections when assigning peer reviews when automatically assigning peers in an assignment is set. This means a student from section A might be assigned as peer to a student in section B. This is problematic in case people from Section A and Section B are not collaboratively related.

Suggested solution

1. When automatically assigning peer is enabled, Canvas should by default, respect the section of each student separately to match the section of the peer to be assigned.

2. An option should be available to override limiting by section. This could be done by adding the checkbox "Allow assigning peers from different sections":

   

Example

Lets say the following students in different sections are assigned to the same assignment:

Students	Section
Student A1	A
Student B1	B
Student A2	A
Student B2	B
Student A3	A
Student B3	B
Student A4	A
Student B4	B
Student A5	A
Student B5	B

When Canvas is looping through all students in the assignment to find a peer it should look for the section of each student is in and select a peer from the respective section only. So e.g. Student A4 (from section A) will never be assigned as peer to Student B2.

The suggested solution would work for the following scenarios:

• Assignment with one section assigned where peers are assigned to students from the respective sections
• Assignment with multiple sections or "Everyone" assigned where peers are assigned to students from the respective sections
• Assignment with one section assigned where peers are assigned to students not respective to any section
• Assignment with multiple sections or "Everyone" assigned where peers are assigned to students not respective to any section

This feature request is related to this question Using Peer Review in a course with multiple sections, where the suggested solution appeared not to work.

[stelpstra]

Please also vote for https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/8154 

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

This idea is so useful for FERPA privacy in cross-listed courses, for those who want to use peer reviews. It is especially onerous to need to manually assign reviews in such classes because of the large number of students.

Thanks  @stelpstra ‌ for the link to adding due dates for completing peer review. Very helpful to both teachers and students.

[kblack]

Agreed!  I think this is an important feature to have.

[jayde_colquhoun]

Likewise, we would support this feature idea. 

[stuart_ryan]

I would also support this, would better align the feature with the rest of the LMS respecting student sections.

[c_t_zusterzeel]

I totally agree!  I think this is an important feature to have, especially for big courses (for 1000 students).. which we have a few in our university. 

[Cirrus]

Agreed! Also, another option for allowing students to peer review across sections would be not having them marked "can only interact with their section". In fact, have you tried that? If you trigger the 'this user can only interact with users in their section' option for students, does it still assign them incorrectly?

[wagarse]

This would also be a great feature for composition/writing-intensive classes, where frequent small-group peer review of rough drafts is a very common practice.  (And it's common for instructors of these courses to teach multiple sections per semester.)  

I write this after discovering today that I would need to spend 15-20 minutes per section manually assigning my students to review their groupmates' drafts. Taking a break right now from the repetitive, mind-numbing clicking that task entails   

[ericwerth]

I would like to throw my hat in to support this change as well.  This option can both save teachers time and increase the usefulness of the peer review feature itself.  If students in different sections are given different version of an assignment, or online peer reviews are going to be followed by in-class debriefs, this could be particularly helpful.

[cms_hickss]

We have many large (250-1600 students) courses (where sections have been crosslisted together) and this would be much appreciated by the TAs (and probably the teacher too) who are assigned to the individual sections.