[Peer Review] Respecting sections when automatically assigning peer reviews

Situation

Canvas does not respect the sections when assigning peer reviews when automatically assigning peers in an assignment is set. This means a student from section A might be assigned as peer to a student in section B. This is problematic in case people from Section A and Section B are not collaboratively related.

 

Suggested solution

  1. When automatically assigning peer is enabled, Canvas should by default, respect the section of each student separately to match the section of the peer to be assigned.
  2. An option should be available to override limiting by section. This could be done by adding the checkbox "Allow assigning peers from different sections":

    218985_pastedImage_6.png

Example

Lets say the following students in different sections are assigned to the same assignment:

Students Section
Student A1 A
Student B1 B
Student A2 A
Student B2 B
Student A3 A
Student B3 B
Student A4 A
Student B4 B
Student A5 A
Student B5 B

 

When Canvas is looping through all students in the assignment to find a peer it should look for the section of each student is in and select a peer from the respective section only. So e.g. Student A4 (from section A) will never be assigned as peer to Student B2.

 

The suggested solution would work for the following scenarios:

  • Assignment with one section assigned where peers are assigned to students from the respective sections
  • Assignment with multiple sections or "Everyone" assigned where peers are assigned to students from the respective sections
  • Assignment with one section assigned where peers are assigned to students not respective to any section
  • Assignment with multiple sections or "Everyone" assigned where peers are assigned to students not respective to any section

 

This feature request is related to this question Using Peer Review in a course with multiple sections, where the suggested solution appeared not to work.

Added to Theme

42 Comments
tania_ivanka
Community Novice

Yes please please do this - I am faced with 7 sections / classes, and it isn't practical to manually assign all of these peer reviews - muddling through 170 odd names to assign these will be massively time consuming.

Assigning peer review across  multiple days also seems risky.

My Monday groups are submitting today, and I could assign these automatically NOW, but what happens when the Thursday groups submit and I assign peer reviews again?

Will the monday allocations be messed up?

The solution described here seems really simple and absolutely important for ease of use and also to avoid any teacher bias in the allocation of reviews (as well as the problem of manually assigning and having 1 left over unallocated!!!

GideonWilliams
Community Champion

 @stelpstra ‌ Have just found this and voted for it.

We have courses with up to 7 sections and a real frustration. Canvas allows you to set different assignments and Discussions for sections so why not have peer review per section.

It really is where we should be heading - one course, multiple sections and differentiated tasks and resources...

cstrelow
Community Novice

We do a lot of writing of essays for APUSH and love students providing feedback to one another, but I feel deterred from doing peer reviews given the fact that I have to manually assign students from 3 classes.  Respecting sections would be very useful and convenient.

kim_zocco
Community Explorer

Any resolve out there on this "Respecting the Sections" need?  With coding/programming, peer review is vital and I would really love this tool if it could simply allow the assigned peer reviews to "select" whether or not you want an entire random peer connect, or period/class exclusive reviews.  It's been TWO YEARS since this topic has been brought up, but complained about a longer time within the teacher's lounge.  ??? 

kim_zocco
Community Explorer

Yes... I've done this.  Made for added busy work after school and another time in class that just became dysfunctional.  Sigh.  The thought of being able to have this is super nice... but only if it's USEFUL

Nancy_Webb_CCSF
Community Champion

Yes this would be very useful, especially for those with a large number of sections.  Duplicating the assignment and assigning each one to only one section works fairly easily if you have only two sections, but if you have 7 or more sections as has been mentioned here that's a lot more work. I hope we can get more votes on this.

raehale
Community Explorer

I also really need this ability! Any updates? 

We have Summer Workshops where we would like to have each week of the workshop be a different section of the course. This means that each section participates in the course during a different week. Therefore, if peer-reviews are assigned then (using the current system) they may be assigned to people who no longer have access to the course because their section (week-long workshop) will have concluded.

Additionally, we want the automated assigned peer-reviews because we are managing over 500 participants, 30 - 40 in each section, afternoon and morning sections, etc.

Setting groups for them does not resolve the issue either because the peer-review assignments do not respect groups and intra-group peer-reviews have not been developed. 

We have found that for assignments, discussions, quizzes (classic and new), and even announcements, we can designate the sections and contain the due dates based on sections, but the peer-review within assignments is not respecting those section "assign to X section" parameters when we create our assignments. 

Thanks! I hope we get some answers!

mwolfenstein
Community Participant

This is yet another feature that COVID has highlighted as actually essential rather than just nice to have. I just want to emphasize the part about FERPA here. Combining sections at an institution like mine is only as useful as its ability to respect the legal conditions we have to meet.

lmarks
Community Participant

I agree that this feature needs to be added to enhance the peer review experience.

sallycharris
Community Explorer

I would love to be able to keep peer reviewers to the same section of the class--or even with a group. Currently, I have to create the same assignment for each section if they are to do peer reviews. This clutters the grade book, adds work, and makes managing the course more difficult.

And, a way to grade the person peer reviewing would be helpful, too!