Workflows That Changed in the New Version of the Peer Assessment Tool
The new version of the Peer Assessment tool brings with it changes to some workflows or tasks that were present in the previous version of the tool. Not all features and functionality work the same as in the old version. This post highlights specific workflows that are different in the new version of the Peer Assessment tool.
Changing Due Dates
In the old version of the Peer Assessment tool, you could not change the due date for a peer assessment once that peer assessment opened to students. The new version of the tool allows you to change the due date at any point in time. While you cannot change other settings for the peer assessment once it opens to students, you can change the due date so that students can continue working on their assessments, should that be desired.
Handling Students Who Missed the Deadline to Submit Work to a Drop Box Linked to a Peer Assessment
In the old version of the Peer Assessment tool, students who failed to submit their work to a Drop Box linked to a peer assessment were not included in the random assignment of students to one another. This caused a lot of additional work and frustration for students and faculty alike. In the new version of the Peer Assessment tool, everyone in the class is automatically included when generating the assignment of students to other students, even if a student did not submit a file to the linked Drop Box. This allows for easier catch-up by students who failed to submit their work to a peer assessment-linked Drop Box.
Manually Assigning Students Someone to Assess
In the old version of the Peer Assessment tool, you could manually assign one student to assess another student after the peer assessment opened to students using a manual assignment tool. This is not possible in the new version of the Peer Assessment tool. Manual assignments can only be done in a “Manual Assignment” peer assessment type, where the course instructional team is responsible for making every assignment of one student to another.
The primary reason for this change is performance and reliability in the student assignment process. Mixing multiple assignment types (random for most students + manual for a handful, for example) was the source of a number of significant problems in the old version of the peer assessment tool. This mixing of types led to slow response times and incorrectly assigning students more assessments than they were supposed to get.
The change in how students who missed the deadline to submit work to a Drop Box linked to a peer assessment described above will obviate the need for many manual assignment scenarios. One scenario that will require a different approach is a situation where a peer assessment opens to students before the end of the add period for a given academic term, and students add the course after the peer assessment opens to the class. In this situation, you cannot retroactively add the students who added the course into the currently open peer assessment. The best solution in this problem is to create a new “Manual Assignment” peer assessment that links to the same Drop Box, add all students who added the class after the original peer assessment began, and have those students assess each other.
Viewing a Student’s Peer Assessment Page
In the old version of the Peer Assessment tool, the ability to view a student’s individual Peer Assessment page — the page that listed the names of the students that the given student was assigned to assess — appeared in a drop-down menu at the top of the main listing of all peer assessments in the class.
In the new version of the Peer Assessment tool, viewing a student’s individual Peer Assessment page is now done by going to the “Student Activity” tab of a specific peer assessment. On that view, there is a “Student View” column. Clicking on the arrow in the “Student View” column will take you to that student’s individual assessment page for that peer assessment.
Remember that in the new version of the Peer Assessment tool, students have individual pages for each individual assessment. There is no longer a single listing of all assessments in a class for students. The old version’s listing of all assessments in a class caused performance issues in larger classes and was confusing to students as they saw assessments listed that were in the past or future, or sometimes not used at all.
Links in Schedule Builder to a Peer Assessment
There are two changes to how peer assessments are linked and displayed in the Schedule Builder tool and the main course content page.
First, links to a peer assessment in Schedule Builder now point to an individual peer assessment, not a list of all peer assessments in a course.
Second, the link to an individual peer assessment remains active even after the due date of the peer assessment. This does not mean that students have an infinite amount of time to complete a peer assessment. The due date is still enforced inside the Peer Assessment tool itself. The reason for keeping the link active even after the due date of a peer assessment is that it allows students to then see their results inside the course website.
In the old version of the Peer Assessment tool, students could only see their results via email. This caused numerous problems and additional overhead for course instructional teams. By keeping the link to a peer assessment even after the due date, students have access to their results at any time. Faculty and their TAs still have full control over when the results are displayed to students. Students will not see results until the faculty/TAs release results to students.
As always, if you have questions about these changes, please reach out to the CTL Help team, and we will be happy to answer any questions you might have.