Download original files for peer review

[MelissaHerzog]

Problem statement:

When you have an assignment in Canvas and want to use peer review, in the previous assignment interface, students had the option to download the original submitted file when peer reviewing a student. If the submitted file was in the form of a DOCX file, the student could download the DOCX file and read it in Word (and do annotations there). However, with the new assignment interface, this is no longer possible. When students are peer reviewing a submitted file, it can only be downloaded as an annotated PDF. This makes it impossible for students to practice the skills of using Track Changes in Word. It also forces students to have to do a workaround to export the PDF to Word to even try to do this... and many students don't have Adobe software to do this. 

Proposed solution:

It would be beneficial if students had the option to choose between downloading an annotated PDF or download the original file. In this case the teacher wants the students to do their review and tracking of changes in Word and later upload the file to the Canvas peer review assignment.

[crafte]

Hi @MelissaHerzog - students will not need an Adobe application to export PDF to Word. Students can open Word > go to the File tab > click on Open > navigate to the PDF. This will convert the PDF to Word and students can edit the content in Word. Before editing, the students will need to save the file in Word. Here is a Microsoft guide: Edit a PDF in Word.

[u0477510]

Note this work around is problematic for my engineering students, for whom peer reviewing is an important professional skill to practice and develop.

1. It doesn't keep formatting for reviewing highly structured or formatted documents such as resumes.
2. It doesn't work well with formatting for documents with figures and tables with captions, such as engineering documents.

Students absolutely must be able to download the original document to review.

[u0477510]

I received this workaround from a student using the Outlook notification. Not many of my students access their assigned peer reviews in Outlook.

1. Receive email in Outlook that said “assigned peer review”
2. opened email and pressed “ click here to complete your review”
3. page comes up that says “ Peer Review”
4. shows icon with word and it says name of try file .docx
5. downloaded file and it worked perfectly as a Word document

[ACl4]

I wanted to request the same thing! This would be a very useful feature to get back, so that if instructors want to make use of Microsoft's Track Changes feature during a peer review assignment, they can do so more easily. Currently, only a PDF is able to be downloaded, which does not allow that functionality (and thus, makes it much more difficult for students and instructors to get Word documents to one another).

[silvia_choi]

Just like Melissa has pointed out, we woud like the students to be able to download the original file during peer-review - this is particularly important since the speedgrader annotation feature disappears when you make the peer-review anonymous. We have a task where students have to anotate the .docx file and make comments, as well as track changes. 

The Assignment Enhancement feature stopping students from downloading the original files during peer-review is really making things difficult for us.

[hesspe]

We just encountered this problem with Excel where peer reviewers were only able to download the PDF version of the submitted Excel assignment.  I hope it is why a PDF of a spreadsheet is not suitable for evaluation purposes.  Our solution was to turn off Assignment Enhancements for the course, which is not ideal.