Allow Instructor Markup via DocViewer Even When Anonymous Peer Reviews Are Enabled

(21)

Instructors who select Anonymous Peer Reviews are not shown markup tools in Speedgrader - Doc Viewer.  The tools are disabled/hidden.  

Selecting Anonymous Peer Reviews for students to complete as part of an assignment should not result in a reduced set of grading tools for instructors.  Instructors should be allowed to use markup tools to provide feedback to students regardless of anonymous feedback from other students.  Students should be able to differentiate instructor markup from anonymous feedback; peer review and instructor grading are two separate activities.

36 Comments
bwebster1
Community Novice

I completely agree with this request.  The peer review feature is very useful to me, but I would like to encourage students to provide their honest opinions without revealing to their classmates exactly who the comments came from, which would mean anonymous reviews.  However, if assigning anonymous reviews means that I can't provide my own feedback using Crocodoc, then the usefulness of the peer reviews feature diminishes.  I would be forced to choose between allowing anonymous reviews and submitting my own feedback via an alternate route, or maintaining my access to Crocodoc but forcing the students to reveal who made what comments.

browning339l
Community Contributor

This feature would be very helpful for my course that relies on anonymous peer review.  The feature is there, just make it work across both types of review processes!

browning339l
Community Contributor

Just to be specific, I want the anonymous student peer reviewers to use the toolbar for marking up the text. 

swoo
Community Novice

I cannot agree more! I see absolutely no reason that they should make this as a forced choice between anonymous review and annotation functionality. Considering the ultimate purpose of the peer review activity among students, I think we should be able to choose the anonymous peer review option while having a full access to the annotation functions. 

p_barra
Community Novice

Completely agree. In addition, unless I am mistaken, does the marking toolbar appear for students under non-anonymous mode but does not appear to students under anonymous mode? If this is correct (which I think is what I have seen), the question is why? From a pedagogical perspective, it does not make sense. It should be available in both modes as, rightly said, students feel much more comfortable under anonymous mode to provide comments to work of classmates plus these also feel more comfortable if others don't know who produced the work. Can we have the marking tool in both modes? It seems like a very simple thing to do, from a technical point, as the marking tool already exists under the same peer review environment.

RobDitto
Community Champion

Pedro Barra wrote:

does the marking toolbar appear for students under non-anonymous mode but does not appear to students under anonymous mode? If this is correct (which I think is what I have seen), the question is why? 

 @p_barra , if memory serves, the predecessor capability for annotation feedback in Canvas (known as Crocodoc, which was a product/company purchased by Box) was completely incapable of anonymous annotations. The only way Canvas could deliver the https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1040 feature back in 2015 was by disallowing annotation of submissions with "Peer Reviews Appear Anonymously" set in the assignment's settings.

Considering both the healthy interest in this idea and statement #9 in the DocViewer Plan, I'm hopeful that Canvas will consider possibilities for anonymous annotation by peer reviewers as well as https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/4643-hide-names-of-graders-aka-anonymous-graders?sr=search&sea....

p_barra
Community Novice

Just adding from another idea.

If the marking tools are made available under anonymous mode to students so to allow rich feedback to be provided using the marking tools already offered by Canvas, could we simultaneously get rid of the option to download the file which the student is reviewing as that would break the anonymity of the process (i.e., once you download the file, you know who created the file and thus the process is no longer anonymous)?

arnelson3
Community Novice

I would suggest that the assignments configuration page could provide a warning or "helper text" next to or underneath the "Anonymity" "Peer Reviews Appear Anonymously" setting configuration. The helper text could explain that "setting reviews to appear anonymously will disable speed grader annotation tools."

p_barra
Community Novice

In the interim, perhaps so to warn people that the tool may not do what they intend it to do, however the underlying problem remains. The expectation would be that the speed grader tools would be available (since they already exist in non-anonymous mode). 

solomonmklein
Community Novice

I would go further with this - anonymous peer reviewers should also have access to the annotation tools, but their comments should appear anonymously. Peer reviewing and annotations are both strengths of the Canvas platform, but at the moment they are mutually exclusive, when they should complement one another.

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team
This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas 

For more information, please read through the Canvas Release Notes (2018-09-15) .

browning339l
Community Contributor

I agree, please make this valuable tool available to both instructors and peer reviewers for anonymous mode!

browning339l
Community Contributor

When will it actually be available??

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

Hey  @browning339l  

Sorry about the confusion here.  When I was comparing feature ideas to the release notes I missed the section on this idea related to Peer Reviews.  This idea has not been developed.  My apologies, again.

RobDitto
Community Champion

If you're interested in this idea, please vote for its counterpart -- a 2018-resubmitted idea by  @browning339l  (thank you!) for students to be able to use DocViewer annotation tools during anonymous peer review.

@solomon_klein ‌, this is partly a follow-up to your comment above; however I wanted this link to appear at the bottom for visibility.)

christie_kittle
Community Participant

The markup tools should be available regardless of whether peer review is anonymous or not - for instructors AND students.Imagine how much more powerful and valuable it would be if students could markup during peer reviews. Please make this happen.

browning339l
Community Contributor

really need this to happen! 

andersov
Community Explorer

Shouldn't be hard for Instructure to implement. Just check if anonymous is turned on, then tag markup comments with 'anonymous', rather than name.

mcarter45
Community Novice

Not just instructor markup ... doc viewer in general I dont understand why it would be disabled... just because someone cant see who annotated the pdf's or docs doesnt mean you shouldnt be able to do it. Esp for teachers but students also ... students are giving peer feedback, why would we want to hinder that by not allowing annotations just because we want it to be anonymous. You have what they the student turned in, anytime someone makes an annotation it's shared as a separate copy from the original between that person (or in a ta's perspective role of people) and the student who's assignment you are annotating. Any edits to the annotation from the one annotating it would create a new version or something or would just annotate in place the copy you made.


TA-Student (all ta's / teachers / etc in needing access to it see it, as well as the student)

Student - Student (both students see it, and all ta's, teachers, etc ... see it)

May be more cases but these 2 esp should just work. 

ctsang
Community Explorer

A faculty member just asked about this. With more and more universities moving to online teaching, this feature needs to be implemented in order to meet the needs of the evolving online classroom environment.