Creating Peer Review Groups in Canvas

PlayPosit Peer Review Assignments leverage the Canvas groups feature to split students into small groups. To complete a PlayPosit Peer Review Assignment, students must submit a video to the assignment and then return to the assignment to complete a peer review for each of the submissions of the students in their small group. Before creating the PlayPosit assignment, instructors should, in their Canvas course, create a group set that can used for the assignment and assign each student to a group within the set. Please reference the following Canvas Instructor Guide for instructions on creating a group set in your Canvas course:

How do I add a group set in a course?

Creating the PlayPosit Peer Review Assignment

Once the group set is ready in the Canvas course, instructors can create a new assignment with the external tool submission type in the course and configure it as a PlayPosit Peer Review Assignment by performing the following steps:

1. Navigate to the Assignments page of the Canvas course by clicking Assignments in the course navigation menu.
   
   
   
   
2. Click the + Assignment button.
   
   
3. Enter a name for the Assignment in the name field.
   
   
4. Enter details and instructions for the assignment in the details field. In this field, you should specify requirements for both the video submission and peer review evaluations students will be required to complete. To help provide technical scaffolding for students, we recommend including a link to our guide PlayPosit (Canvas) - Peer Review Assignment Guide for Students.
   
   
5. Enter a point value for the assignment in the "Points" field.
   
   
6. Select External Tool in the "Submission Type" drop down menu.
   
   
7. Underneath "Enter or find an External Tool URL," Click the Find button.
   
   
   
   
8. In the list of tools in the Configure External Tool menu, select PlayPosit. The gray PlayPosit assignment setup screen will load in the Link Resource from External Tool window.
   
   
   
   
9. In the gray PlayPosit assignment setup screen, click the Enter PlayPosit link to load the My Bulbs menu of PlayPosit.
   
   
   
   
10. In the My Bulbs menu, click the down arrow next to the "Add New Bulb" button and select Add Peer Review Assignment.
    
    
    
    
11. Enter a name in the "Name of Peer Review Assignment" field.
    
    
12. Update the text in the "Learning objective/instructions" field to add instructions and requirements specific to your assignment. Consider writing a condensed version of the requirements you provided in the details field of the assignment in Canvas (see step 4). Students will see these instructions within the PlayPosit interface.
    
    
13. If you want to require students to fill out a rubric while evaluating their peers' submissions, select the Enable grading rubric option. If you do not wish to have students use a rubric, instead enter the point value you wish to use in the "Points" field. When using a rubric, the total assignment point value in PlayPosit will be calculated automatically from the sum of points possible across all rubric criteria.
    
    NOTE: This point value does not need to match the value specified in Canvas during step 5; PlayPosit will pass the percentage of points earned versus points possible in PlayPosit to Canvas, which uses that percentage to calculate the Canvas gradebook score.
    
    
14. If you enabled rubric grading in the previous step, click the Create Rubric button then proceed to step 15. If you are not using a rubric, click the Save button that appears in place of the Create Rubric button and skip to step 17 of this guide.
    
    
    
    
15. Create your rubric in the rubric designer:
    • Add additional criterion by selecting Add Numeric Criterion.
    • Enter a descriptive label for each criterion in its text field.
    • To adjust the point value of each criterion, click the Out of X Points button and adjust the point value slider. Each criterion can be worth between 1 and 5 points.
    • If you want to add organizational section headers above groups of criteria, select Add Section and enter a title for the section.
    • Criterion can be reordered by clicking and dragging the handle dots on the left edge of the criterion.
    • Delete an unwanted criterion by clicking its red trash can icon.
      
      
      
      
16. Once you have finished creating your rubric, click the Assign button located in the bottom right of the rubric designer window.
    
    
17. Next you must select a Canvas group set to use for the learner peer groups for this assignment:
    1. In the Link Assignment menu, click the Manage Group Sets button.
       
       
       
       
    2. Under the Import Group Sets tab of the Learner Group Sets window that opens, click the Fetch Group Sets button.
       
       
       
       
    3. If this is your first time fetching Canvas groups from PlayPosit, a tab may open prompting you to authorize PlayPosit to access data from your Canvas account. Click Authorize and then return to the PlayPosit tab of your browser.
       
       
    4. If you see the message "Unauthorized canvas authenticating now" appear, click the same Fetch Group Sets button again. The second attempt should succeed. You will see a "Fetching Imported Groups" message and then your Canvas group sets will appear in the Learner Group Sets window.
       
       
    5. In the bottom-right corner of the Learner Group Sets window, click the Save and Close button to return to the Link Assignment window where you will select the appropriate imported group set.
       
       
       
       
    6. In the "Select Group Set" drop-down menu, select the group set you wish to use for the assignment.
       
       
    7. Click the Link button. The PlayPosit setup window will close and you will be returned to the Canvas Configure External Tool menu.
       
       
       
       
18. In the Canvas Configure External Tool menu, click the Select button. The external tool URL now appears in the Submission Type box's external tool URL field.
    
    
    
    
19. Enter a due date and availability dates for the Canvas assignment.
    
    
20. At the bottom of the page, click Save to save the assignment, or click Save & Publish to save the assignment and publish it.
    
    

Monitoring and Grading a PlayPosit Peer Review Assignment

After students have begun submitting to the assignment, you can monitor their progress and enter grades by navigating to the assignment in your Canvas course and clicking the Monitor button in the gray PlayPosit window. Grades that the instructor enters in PlayPosit will pass back to the Canvas gradebook. For more information on using the PlayPosit Monitor page to grade Peer Review Assignments, please see PlayPosit Help - Grading a Peer Review Bulb.