Peer reviews for staggered due dates

[jmccormick3]

I have a project that lasts all semester.  I have a different due date for each student and I want to randomly assign a peer review in advance so that those doing a review will know that it is their week to do the review.  Do I have to manually assign them in this case or is there a way to get canvas to randomly assign them right now even though the first project will not be turned in for another week?

[kblack]

Hi  @jmccormick3  - Good question!  And I have an astute, carefully prepared answer:  "It depends."

Here's the basic issue with peer reviews in Canvas: you can assign a due date for the original, student submission that will ultimately be the subject of a peer review.  You cannot, however, assign a due date within that same assignment for the peer reviews themselves to be completed.  There is, in fact, a Feature Idea that I encourage you vote up and comment upon if you like, which is here: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1294-have-two-due-dates-for-peer-review-assignments" modifiedt... . 

The other issue to be aware of is that with automatically assigned peer reviews, I highly encourage you to set a date to automatically assign the peer reviews to be a few days after the assignment itself is due, because otherwise the default setting is for Canvas to assign the peer reviews right away.  (As explained in How do I automatically assign peer reviews for an assignment? )  The problem?  Any late submissions will not be assigned a peer review, and you will wind up with some people having to do more than their fair share of peer reviews or reassigning them manually, anyway.

But there a few other issues at play with staggered due dates and peer reviews.  You might think that this would be a great opportunity to try using differentiated assignments, assigning (for example) the students that you want in your first group to be peer reviewed, as covered here: How do I assign an assignment to an individual student?   I just tried that on a sample class, creating a peer review assignment for 2 students in a class, due today.  After they submitted their work, the ONLY students available to be assigned peer reviews--even manually--were those two students.  (With manually-assigned peer reviews, you are presented with a drop-down menu of students to assign as peer reviewers.  That drop-down menu, in this sample case where I had a peer review assigned to only two students, offered only those students to become peer reviewers.)

So the bottom line is if you want Canvas do this for you with different due dates for each student, you will have to be content with:

a.) Having at least two students assigned to each due date AND

b.) Also be content with that same group of students being assigned as peer reviewers for each other.  Again, this makes no difference whether they are automatically assigned peer reviews or manually-assigned.

I hope this makes a bit of sense!  The Canvas peer reviewing system DOES work, but there are many things to be aware of, and it makes things a bit tricky if you want different due dates.  It's do-able, but be aware of these issues.

I hope this helps a bit, Jeff.

[venitk]

Jeff, you might consider ditching the peer review tool and instead using discussions.  The peer reviews would be public, and would not be anonymous to the other students, so if that's a deal breaker, then this wouldn't work. 

If this sounds appealing, you could have one discussion board where students post their assignment.

Each week, create a Calendar Event with the names of the students whose turn it is to do the peer review and a due date for who has to turn something in. Students will have to know to go to the calendar to look. 

You could also create a no submission assignment for students, telling them when to turn their work to be evaluated, and then assign each student a different date. If you have a larger class, that might not be too much bother, though. However, as an assignment, you could assign a grade and it would appear in the calendar and in assignments (and in the modules, if you add to a module).