Hide Names of Graders (aka Anonymous graders)

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

Canvas currently offers the ability to hide the names of students whose work is being graded, but it does not offer the ability to hide the name(s) of those grading an assignment. Faculty frequently ask how to hide the identity of the teaching team member who grades a particular assignment. This feature is especially important for courses that are co-taught and for large-enrollment courses with multiple TAs, who might be subject to backlash for grades received.

 

Currently, we advise them to use the Crocodoc annotations Text Tool in SpeedGrader to provide feedback, but this is not ideal. Sometimes student submissions have very little white space in which to place these annotations, and they can be difficult for students to find and read. And this significantly limits the means by which faculty and TAs can grade: bulk uploading graded files displays names, SpeedGrader comments display names, and comment annotations display names. Additionally, the SpeedGrader mobile apps do not currently include the text annotation tool, which means that graders who need to hide their identities cannot grade using mobile devices.

 

A much easier solution for instructors would be one that hides the grader's name (perhaps replacing the individual's name with a generic term like "grader").

 

This idea has come up previously (Anonymous Graders  and Ability to hide the identity of graders in the comments in Speedgrader ) but did not reach the 100-vote threshold. However, there was interest in (and confusion about) whether this feature was deployed as part of  Canvas Studio: Anonymous Grading.

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-15420 .

37 Comments
hfchen
Community Participant

Would this address the current limitation where you can only pick one of anonymous peer review and annotation in Docviewer? If so it's very much a needed feature.

erinpac1
Community Novice

This would be very useful when we upload grades from external sources via the API.  Right now, it attributes every comment to one TA, which is both not useful for students who contact them instead of the instructor, and not even accurate for transparency purposes.  

I do understand the desire to encourage transparency to the students.  However, in trying to enforce that, it makes the application less flexible for large college classes or unusual situations.  Sometimes we ARE trying to communicate in the best way possible to the students, and want to use options not to avoid that, but to keep everything clear, organized, and well matched to the individual class situation.

curtain
Community Participant

This is an excellently stated point.  The overwhelming requirement of ensuring transparency to students sometimes gets in the way of effectively managing and communicating with students.  A point to consider by the Instructure folks is the tendency for Canvas to communicate a bunch of small and (often) inconsequential things to students causes them to develop a blindness to the communication from Canvas and prevents instructors from effectively communicating with them.

jasonskeffingto
Community Member

Teachers Aids.  This is important for Teacher's Aids who perform grading of assignments.  Their identities should be protected, even if there is an ideological bent toward instructor transparency. 

mbcarr
Community Novice

What if there was such a thing as "Grading Groups"? When setting up a course you could have a radio option button for "single grader" vs "grader group". You would be able to add users to the group if "grader group" was selected and set up one or many groups of graders. You could have a primary instructor assigned as the point of contact for questions (solving the problem of graders being hassled by student questions when they shouldn't be). When using speedgrader the group name would appear instead of the individual name. So rather than the comment reading "John Smith" it would say "Grade Group A" or whatever you've named your group to be. (So solving the problem of Anonymous grading for TA's.) This "Grade Group A" could be a link that produces a card view which would list the graders in that group and who the primary contact person is. (This would solve transparency and communication). Just a suggestion - not sure how feasible it is for development to make it happen. 

278281_Grade Group Setup.png278426_Speed Grader.png

erinhmcmillan
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni
Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the Canvas Beta Release Notes (2018-07-02) 

erinpac1
Community Novice

Is there a related part I'm overlooking in the release notes?  They only seem to mention hiding student/grader names from other graders, not students.  I was interested to see this release notes comment.... but it doesn't seem to relate to this suggestion.

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

 @erinpac1  

I'll look through the information again, also, but did you read through the supplementary document?

Canvas Release: Anonymous Moderated Grading 

lindalee
Community Contributor

Hi Renee Carney and Erin Paciorkowski,

Like Erin, I'm confused about where this feature idea is represented in the Canvas Beta Release Notes (2018-07-02) . My understanding of Canvas Release: Anonymous Moderated Grading is that hiding graders' names is not necessarily part of this feature idea, and that the DocViewer updates that will allow anonymized feedback has not yet been developed.

-Linda

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

 @erinpac1  &  @lindalee  

You both are correct.  We goofed and marked this in beta, when it is not.  So many hidden names....