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
kmcgrath
Community Participant

I understand how it works from the technology perspective, but it should not be that difficult to mask the reviewer's name AND allow annotations.  As an ESL instructor, peer reviews are basically useless if all they write is 1-2 sentences of global advice.  And even if the students can't, I should be able to annotate!  

 

At the very least, when "anonymous peer reviews" is checked, an alert to this effect should be displayed to the instructor.  I've already told my students that their work and reviews will be anonymous, and now I will have to backtrack.  

edonathadmin
Community Member
Status changed to: Open
 
castrot
Community Novice

Please allow both students and instructors to use tools to peer review even when anonymous. I agree wholeheartedly because this tool is valuable to help the student give more motivated feedback (they can point directly to the sentence they are referring to) and it also shows them how teacher's give feedback. 

hcorneli
Community Novice

This issue has been going on for years! Please allow maximum functionality and access to support on student work by allowing annotations on peer-reviewed assignments. The annotation tool AND the peer review tool help students improve! 

u0035090
Community Novice

I echo everyone else's thoughts. The anonymity of the peer reviewer should have nothing to do with the tools an instructor should be able to use in grading.

RebeccaReaRoss
Community Explorer

Agreed. And as I stated on another thread, bare minimum, Canvas needs to add this information to its official documentation so instructors aren't tearing their hair out trying to figure out why their docviewer bar is disabled.

a_ambrosini
Community Novice

I can't view the disabling of Speed Grader annotations in this context as anything but a bug.  I can understand the underlying problem (annotations are signed) but this should not be a terribly complicated fix.

I think it would also be nice to allow students to do anonymous markup as part of peer review, but that is more of a feature request than a bug report.

juliestevens
Community Member

This is a very needed feature, especially for our English teachers that are trying to do markups with students that are learning how to edit and review another paper. Please add this feature. 

nick_weiss
Community Member

One other facet to this that I just discovered is that if you spend a bunch of time leaving annotated feedback on student work and then assign peer reviews after, it completely wipes the feedback. Assigning anonymous reviews removes the instructor annotation tools AND any existing annotations you left before assigning the anonymous peer reviews. Luckily, it was only a class of 8 and I only had to redo about 4 students! Just FYI if anyone else runs into this. 

chris_mccrory
Community Novice

Yes. Please allow instructor markup via docviewer when anonymous peer reviews are enabled.

johan_larsson
Community Explorer

I seems like there are two issues being discussed simultaneously here: 

1) instructors should be able to use annotation tools when peer reviews are anonymous, and

2) students should be able to use the annotation tools.

It seems like the author of this issue is really discussing #1 and not #2 (although techincally I guess they may be connected), so it should probably be discussed here: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Idea-Conversations/Anonymous-peer-reviews-should-be-able-to-use-m....

To me, #1 just seems like a bug. For what reason shouldn't instructors be able to use the annotation tools when peer reviews are anonymous? The instructor's comments are not, unless I am mistaken, anonymous, so why is this not working?

rnewton5
Community Participant

Please roll out this feature! I would like to use both anonymous peer review AND instructor markup via docviewer.

WillGHampton
Community Explorer

This needs to be fixed. Turning on anonymous Peer review should not have anything to do with Instructors feedback. Anonymous Peer review should apply only to students, not instructors grading papers.

JessicaRobbins
Community Novice

This was a really frustrating four hours of anxiety for me when I thought that all of my comments had disappeared after turning on anonymous peer reviews. I'd love to see this fixed so that others don't go through this same frustration! 

byoung86
Community Explorer

Another basic functionality that Canvas has lacked for years? This is incredibly frustrating and disappointing. 

ProductPanda
Instructure
Instructure
Status changed to: Archived
Comments from Instructure

As part of the new Ideas & Themes process, all ideas in Idea Conversations were reviewed by the Product Team. Any Idea that was associated with an identified theme was moved to the new Idea & Themes space. Any Idea that was not part of the move is being marked as Archived. This will preserve the history of the conversations while also letting Community members know that Instructure will not explore the request at this time.