Can peer reviews be 'reviewed' by staff before students see them?

[SJOConnor]

I run a small peer review exercise where I assign students to review each others' work anonymously. I currently do this manually because I do not want reviews going back to the original students without staff oversight. I have intervened once when a student was incredibly rude to a classmate in their review, so I am uncomfortable using automated systems that don't allow this intermediate review.

However, my class size is about to quadruple so I need to explore other options. My understanding is that Canvas doesn't allow for this checking before students can see their reviews - can anyone confirm or have suggestions on how to manage this within Canvas?

[srbpr_]

Hey SJConnor, You are correct to be concerned about the limitations of Canvas's built-in peer review for your specific needs. Based on the documentation and community discussions, Canvas does not have a native feature that allows for instructor moderation of peer reviews before they are released to the student whose work was reviewed. 

Since Canvas doesn't offer a "hold" feature for reviews, you'll need to create a workaround or use a third-party tool.

The Manual "Manual" Process (Scaling up your current method)

This is the most time-consuming option but gives you complete control. Instead of using the Canvas peer review tool, you would:

• Create a "No Submission" assignment for the peer review. This would be where students submit their feedback on their peers' work.

• Instruct students to submit their peer review feedback to this new "no submission" assignment. This keeps the feedback private and only visible to you.

• Manually distribute the original student submissions to the reviewers (e.g., by email, or a shared folder).

• You review each submission. After a review, if it is appropriate, you copy and paste the feedback into the student's original assignment comments.

• This is labor-intensive, but it's the only way to guarantee you have oversight before a student sees a review. With a quadrupled class size, this might not be a feasible long-term solution.

For a growing class, your best bet is to either continue with a more manual process using the "No Submission" workaround or, ideally, to explore a third-party tool designed for this purpose.