Peer Assessment Updates for the Start of First Term

August 21, 2019 | 2 Minute Read

The CoursePlus team is constantly fielding feedback from faculty, staff, and students. Peer assessments are complex activities in any course, and each course runs their peer assessments a little differently from any other course. Building a single tool that accommodates the ways in which everyone runs their peer assessments requires the CoursePlus team to continually refine the Peer Assessment tool.

To that end, a number of changes were made to the Peer Assessment user interface to make it easier to discover and use the many options in the tool, including:

• It's much more obvious where faculty enter their own feedback on a student assessment.
• Instructions on sending results are now displayed when there are results to send.
• Details about “What to show when students are emailed their results” have been expanded and clarified.
• The controls on the main page of the Peer Assessment tool have been reorganized to group similar functions together.
• Checkboxes on the report page have been moved and organized to make their purpose clearer.
• The "n/n" counter column on the main report page has been removed to reduce visual clutter.

The "Assessment Summary" report — the report that shows the collected responses from other students about a single student in the class — has received a lot of attention as well. The following changes have been made to that report:

• The report looks more like a plain-text report, and less like an interactive form. The primary text font on the report has been made slightly smaller and uses an easier-to-read font.
• You no longer have to scroll through individual cells in the rubric to read long-form text in that cell.
• You no longer have to scroll through long-form student comments on a criteria in a rubric.
• A link has been added to the end of the report to jump back to the top of the report.
• An "Add faculty feedback" button now appears at the top of the report which, when clicked, immediately jumps you to the part of the report where you can enter your own feedback for the student.
• All all scores now consistently show to 2 decimal places.

Additionally, a new report has been added that shows who each student assessed — the "Who Assessed Who" report. This report makes it easy to quickly see the other students to which student was assigned.

We hope that all of these changes make it easier for you to use the Peer Assessment tool in your courses. If you have any questions about these changes, or have additional feedback about the Peer Assessment tool, please contact CTL Help!