[Peer Review] Utilize SpeedGrader for Peer Reviews

[kholt12]

When we assign students a peer review in canvas, they do not have access to the speedgrader. What they end up with is a slightly clunky assortment of pop-out windows for viewing/annotating and the rubric, necessitating a lot of back and forth side-scrolling and switching between windows. For students who already have trouble navigating an online course, this is an unnecessary barrier to an already nerve-wracking assignment. We have the ability to use speedgrader. Hopefully we can give our students that power too, or at least better design a side-by-side rubric/annotation system for peer review, like in the speedgrader. 

[Stef_retired]

 @kholt12 ‌

Thanks for sharing this idea. For context, access to Speedgrader is a permission associated with the instructor role, as it allows the user to modify grades. Students access DocViewer through the submission interface depicted in the Create Annotated Feedback section of How do I submit a peer review to an assignment?  We've moved this idea forward for additional discussion of a simplified workflow.

[iwoods]

This needs to be up-voted in a major way. I'm shocked that so few people have made this complaint so far. It's an obvious problem. 

The screen that I see when assessing student work is in something called the "speed grader." This view, for me, is easy to navigate and understand. Both the rubric comments and the other comments appear on the right. The two columns on the left are gone, so making highlights and annotations (though sometimes difficult because the mouse doesn't want to attach correctly to highlight a text, but that is a different topic) is easy. The annotations are both easy to create and easy to see. 

I have included two screen shots that show how terrible the navigation is for students. This screen is no way intuitive. Students have to know to click on the "View Feedback" link. However, even when they do, the annotation page appears floating inside that tiny window, with text so small it is difficult or impossible to see, even if the student can expand the window enough to see it. The only alternative is to somehow figure out that they can either hit the full screen icon (two arrows) or the download icon to get a pdf of the annotations. At the same time, this is only a small part of their comments, because students should be looking at BOTH their annotations and their rubric comments. However, in order to see the rubric comments, instead of already being with the other comments on the right like we see in the instructor view of the speed grader, they have to notice and click on a tiny link in the upper right. To make matters even worse, when those comments pop out, they sometimes cover up the tiny annotations window. 

The navigation for students to see all of their comments should be relatively intuitive. Instead, the navigation of these screens is so opaque that I often have to walk through it carefully with every student to make sure that they aren't missing my comments. 

[daya1]

I believe many of my students don't ever see even these screens and instead only see the Grades screen. There is a small icon to the far right on the Grades screen to indicate when there is feedback, but this only shows the feedback left in the comment section. It doesn't include the annotated feedback inside the assignment or the rubric. There is a separate icon for viewing the rubric, but I wish there was a single button they could click on that would take them to a screen similar to the Speed-Grading screen which has the rubric, the comment section comments, and the annotated feedback all visible in one place and only one click away.

[iwoods]

April,
I just discovered that people have been asking for an overhaul of this terrible page design for five years. Here is a link to another request on the same issue: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/3254-making-feedback-more-visible-to-students 
We should keep upvoting this until it gets attention. It is so confusing for my students. 

[daya1]

I'm happy to upvote! I'll do that now.

[wet2]

Completed Peer Reviews should be available in SpeedGrader for Instructors to provide credit versus hunting down the Peer Reviews in the Peer Review tab. 

Perhaps our situation is different.  Let me explain.  We give credit for submitting an article review; we give credit for a student doing a peer review on that article.  The ARTICLE Review Assignment is worth two points for timely submission; this works in SpeedGrader including highlighted for late submission.  We automatically assign a Peer Review. 

Giving credit for the Peer Review is where the issue is overly onerous.  You have to go to the Peer Review tab then search for reviews with an "checkmark".  There are three issues here. 

1) Peer Reviews aren't filterable by section. 

2) Completed Peer Review rubrics aren't timestamped

3) Peer Reviews aren't checked if the rubric isn't complete (which is really a student not following instructions issue). 

A second order issue is that we have to create second assignment titled "Credit for Completing a Peer Review"  since we can't award points for the article review and the peer review (and assign due dates for both) in the same grade column.  I would love any ideas on how to restructure to assignments to improve grading and reduce student confusion.  

[milesl]

There are so many things that make peer reviews difficult to use, from the confusing configuration, to the fact that it can't be used for grading. During a consultation today, I was surprised to realize what has been pointed out here, namely:

1. The peer review screen does not use the docviewer, so instead of seeing the submission embedded in the page, the student must click a link to view it as a pop-up

2. The link they must click to view the page is called "view feedback" and the hover text is "preview your submission and view teacher feedback, if available." If I understand correctly, there are at least two things wrong with this language: 1. your are previewing your peer's submission, not your submission 2. if a teacher added feedback to an assignment, it would be shown only to the student who submitted that assignment, never to the peers reviewing that assignment.

There is a lot of work that needs to be done to make peer review simple, but there are some clear improvements that could be made here by routing peer review to use the same interface as speedgrader.

[azylstra]

Students need to have the same functionality as speedgrader in the peer review section. At the moment to review someone's work students have to view the document in a different window. I want them to be able to see the document beside the rubric.

[SvenSorenson]

I agree this is an urgent priority. Peer Review needs a major overhaul to make it consistent with other aspects of Canvas and to make it useful for all users: students and teachers alike.