[ARCHIVED] Automatic Peer Review Assigned to Non-Submitting Students

[davidgs]

I understand that Canvas can automatically assign peer reviews only to students who have submitted the original assignment, and I understand that I can manually assign peer reviews to students whether they have submitted the original assignment or not.

Does Instructure plan to update the peer review tool so instructors can automatically assign peer feedback to all students, whether they submitted the original assignment or not?

Some of us want all students to do peer feedback.

Cheers.

[kmallen]

Hi @davidgs,

I haven't seen anything in the release notes about this yet; however, there is an idea posted for the same request that I think you might want to comment on and vote for: Canvas Peer Review Auto-assign doesn't auto-assign late submissions  

I need to vote for it, too! My colleagues and I were just discussing needing this feature for peer reviews at our institution.

Be well,

Kristen

[davidgs]

Done! Thanks, @kmallen .

[TonyMason]

Deciding to ignore this request leads to a frustrating situation in which Canvas is unusable in this instance.

The project in my case is a group design project (teams of 1-3 students, self-selected.)  You require that everyone in the group submit the same thing, otherwise you count the students that didn't submit as not having submitted and thus you don't assign them other people's assignments to review.  Manual assignment of review is now a nightmare, since I have to know who is in the group with a given student before I can assign anything to them.  I cannot see this at the same time, so I'm trying to make sure they don't get assigned their own reports.

Thus, to implement this it seems that Canvas' expectation is that each member of a group must submit the report, which creates a separate burden of ensuring the reports are the same - and that doesn't make sense.  This also means that the reports with the largest groups will have more reviews than the reports with the smallest groups, which doesn't make sense either.

So, reasonable solutions might be to allow group submissions count for all members of the group (a "collaborative model") or to have a button that allows us to assign random entries from groups outside one that the students are in.

This is an example of poor HCI work - a missing use case so there is a failure to grasp why the existing implementation is deficient.

[James]

@TonyMason 

Why are you using self-selected groups?

I had students tell me what groups they wanted to be in, but then I put them into the groups. Self-selected groups cannot be used to assign group assignments, meaning that each person will have to submit their own assignment.

If you assign the groups yourself by creating a group set, then it can be a group assignment and one submission will count for the whole group. When you go into SpeedGrader, you don't see the student names, you see the group names. You can still assign grades individually if you desire by checking a box when you set up the assignment and then you will see each student in SpeedGrader and have to grade the same thing multiple times.

Canvas expectation is that for a group assignment there will be just one submission for the group. Canvas does not expect that students must turn in the same submission for a group assignment. If you're seeing that, then you're not really doing a "group" (Canvas nomenclature) assignment, you're doing a regular assignment where you let a team of people work on it together.

You then run into a different problem when going to assign peer reviews. Everyone in the group has submitted it as long as anyone in the group has submitted it. So having some students without submissions isn't a big deal as almost every group turns in something. The problem is when you see the grades, you see what group they're in, but when you assign peer reviews, it's by name. So manual assignment is indeed painful.

The good news is that Canvas has an option to avoid intragroup assignments when doing the automatic assignment. That means that if Tom and John are in the same group, they won't get assigned peer reviews of each other. And Canvas can do that automatically for you provided that you set up the groups.

But you don't get any of that if you let students self-select their groups within Canvas.

See How do I assign an assignment to a course group? in the Canvas Instructor's Guide for more information.

For what it's worth, groups assign a lot of overhead and so I reserve them for major projects with multiple assignments that are truly group efforts (not individual efforts). For other things, I assign a small team of people to work together, but have to grade each person's assignment separately since there is no instructor-assigned group within Canvas for it.