How do I assign assignments for peer review?

To assign an assignment for peer review, proceed as follows:

Create an assignment (see How do I create assignments?) or select an assignment for which there are already submissions and select Require Peer Reviews.
Select, if you want to assign the peer review manually at a certain date and time or automatically. If you have selected automatically, enter, how many feedbacks should be given by each person (you can adapt this later on) and when the peer review should start (directly after the due date of the assignment or later on).
Decide, if the peer review is done anonymously. In this case, reviewers cannot annotate their feedback directly into the text of the reviewees.
Click Save.

With a click on the assignment you get to the configuration settings of the assignment. On the right side, you can see the settings for the peer review (=Peer Reviews). Click on it, ...

to activate an automated assigning of reviewers (retroactively).
to assign manually per person. If this is done, only those people are assigned with peer reviews who submitted the assignment already. If there are no submissions yet, the button Assign Peer Reviews is grayed out.
to view submissions and peer reviews via a click on the name.
to remind students about the peer feedback (click on the bell icon next to a name).

NOTE: You can assign peer review automatically and manually, or you can change the automated assigning later on.

An exclamation mark signalises that no peer review has been given, yet. A Checkmark signalises that review has already been done.

As soon as there are assignments, students see the peer review assignment in their To Do-list. They see the assigned peer feedback directly in their assignment in the same way (exclamation mark for open feedback assignments and checkmarks for completed review assignments). If the non-anonymous feedback option has been selected, peers can write annotations straight into the file by clicking on Show Feedback in the left corner of the window with the submission. Annotations for the following kind of submissions are possible: What types of files can be previewed in Canvas?

You can configure the following feedback scenarios:

Feedback of single persons for a group submission: Activate the peer review for a group submission. Per default, only persons can be assigned as reviewers who are not part of the group. Optionally, the function can be deactivated.
ATTENTION: The group name is not displayed, only the names of the individual group members.
If a feedback has been entered for a group member, it is entered automatically for all members of the group. Each peer who gives reviews enters an individual feedback and cannot view feedbacks of other peers. Members of the group will see the collected feedback of all individual reviewers upon release
Feedback from individuals for individuals: Activate the feedback in an assignment for individual students.

NOTE: Peer feedback cannot be designed as a group-to-group activity, i.e. reviewers will be always individual persons giving feedback to single or group assignments.

WARNING: Student View cannot be used to test peer reviews because the test student cannot be a allocated as a reviewer. You can add fellow coleagues as peer review participants in a course on a trial basis or use your own Canvas demo account. If you would like such a demo account for Canvas WU, write a Canvas Helpdesk-Ticket.

Use Cases

What?	How?
Feedback directly as a text/file annotation	As submission type, select Online, and as Online Entry Options select file upload with file type all text formats (e.g.PDF). Peer review must not be done anonymously. Students can only enter annotations and comments directly into the text. In the SpeedGrader, your can select the individual annotation versions in a window and view them before you (optionally) annotate yourself and enter the grade.
Feedback via rubrics	Select submission type Online and any type of assignment. Add rubrics (a criteria scheme for the feedback) right at the beginning, when setting up the assignment or only with the start of the peer review. The rubrics can be rather qualitative (e.g. a list of criteria + a field for comments for each criterion which must not be left empty) or rather quantitative (a list of criteria and points e.g. 3 points for criterion fully met, 0 points for criterion not met). Students will see the rubric for each peer review, and they have to enter comments and/or points. In the SpeedGrader, you can select each single peer review and view it before you (optionally) use the rubrics yourself and enter the grade.
Feedback as comment	Select submission type Online and any type of assignment. Students can use the standardized comment options for their feedback (simple text comments, audio or video comments, file upload). In the SpeedGrader, you can see each feedback. There, you can (optionally) add your own feedback and the grades.

NOTE: If you want students to reflect on their own submission, then creating an assignment with the submission type Student Commentary is sufficient (see: What are the assignment types in an assignment?).