Peer review in Canvas

What is peer review?

Peer review is a feature that your teacher can enable for an assignment in Canvas, which means that when you and your fellow students have submitted an assignment, they must submit a peer response to each other's assignments. Once you have been assigned a submission by another student to respond to, it will appear in your "To Do" list in Canvas and you can also access it by entering the assignment itself. Below the submission details you can find your assigned peer response information. The date on which the peer response is assigned is determined by your teacher, but it is at the earliest at the submission date.

How do I leave feedback?

There are up to five ways to provide feedback, but which ones you have available or will use depend on what your teacher has chosen in Canvas and what he wrote in the assignment. You will always be able to: 

• write text comments 
•  attach media commentary 
•  attach a file. 

Depending on the teacher's preferences, you can sometimes: 

•  use an assessment matrix, if your teacher added it. 
•  write annotations directly in the text, if the file upload is compatible with Canvas DocViewer and the peer response is not anonymous. 

List of file types compatible with Canvas DocViewer you can find on the following link What types of files can be previewed in Canvas?

How do I peer review? 

Once you have received a submission to peer review, click on it in the To-do list or go to the assignment page. You will find a page with an area for the submission you are peer reviewing and a sidebar where you can write comments and attach media files. If your teacher has included a rubric with criterions, you can click on the "Show rubric" button to open the rubric. 

If the submission is a text file, you need to click on "Show feedback" to be able to see the submission in Canvas and be able to write annotations directly in the text. The annotation tool appears in a menu at the top of the document in Canvas, and with it you can make notes, markings and write comments directly in the document. If you are unable to make annotations, the tool is not activated, the file is incompatible with DocViewer or the peer review is anonymous. 

You can also download the submission by clicking on the submission name, if you prefer to review it outside Canvas. 

Note! Always follow the instructions given by your teacher. Canvas probably has other requirements for counting the peer response as "complete" than your teacher. Canvas requires at least one text comment, attachment or filled in rubric, but does not count annotations and media comments. 

How do I view peer review comments? 

You can see the peer response you have received on an assignment by opening the assignment and clicking on "Submission details" under "Submission" in the sidebar. Here you can see the comments you have received, show the filled in rubric or show annotations made in the document if there are any. By clicking on "Show Feedback" you can see the annotations that have been made. Comments and annotations can be seen immediately when they are made, but the rubric is published after the teacher has chosen to publish the grades.