24 June 2021, 2:52

Hi 

We've been trying out the Peer Assessment function and found some seemingly strange behaviour. 

1. If a 'peer' makes a draft comment and then deletes it the page author receives a notification email (to say the deletion has occurred) which includes the deleted comment.  Is this expected?  
2. Is it also expected that all 'peers' can see 'all feedback' as we would have expected that only the page author and comment author would see the feedback. (Students can be very reluctant to have feedback publically on display)? Would normal 'private' commenting be suitable for this instead?

Thanks for any insights!

Yvonne

25 June 2021, 12:11

Hi Yvonne,

Which version of Mahara are you using? I tested the peer assessment on the latest, i.e. Mahara 21.04 and draft peer assessment comments were not sent. Only published comments made it into a notification.

Anybody who has access to the portfolio can view the peer assessments. That's in contrast to the private comments you can leave on a page or artefact. The rationale was that peer assessments are integral part of the portfolio page and thus form part of the content of the portfolio and should be visible to anyone who has access to the page. In contrast, you can make comments private or public and thus control who can see those. Thus, if you only wish for other students to give feedback on the portfolio, they can use the 'Comments' and may not want to use the peer assessment.

The peer assessment functionality grew out of a need for nurses to be able to leave blind assessments on other nurses' portfolios. That wouldn't have been possible with comments. Further, the peer assessment was to be able to be placed specifically in line with self-assessment. You can watch a presentation that provides the context.

Since then, we've expanded the peer assessment functionality so that peers can see all content in the portfolio if an institution desires that.

Best,

Kristina

27 June 2021, 3:37

Hi Kristina

We're on version 20.10. Is there something we can ask our developers to do to fix the notification issue?

Thanks for the confirmation about the intended purpose of the peer assessment function.  I think normal 'private' commenting is likely to be what we would recommend for peer feedback.

Thanks

Yvonne

04 July 2021, 20:36

Hi Yvonne,

Re the notification issue: I suggest your developer compares the code that you use vs. the one that we publish in case there were any customisations made on your side or the code got out of sync any other way.

Cheers

Kristina