Over the last several months, we’ve worked closely with our community to dive deep into the peer review experience in Canvas, a pain point that many have had for a while. We’ve heard loud and clear that while the feature has incredible potential, there were clear opportunities to improve the process. Based on your feedback, we’ve focused on improving and automating allocation, adding support for dedicated due dates, and building stronger accountability into the student experience—ensuring you have the robust, native tools you need to support your teaching without needing to look elsewhere.
Enhancements for Peer Review are now generally available in Canvas and this is a meaningful workflow change, not just a visual update.
What's new
Two big things change with this release: how peer reviews are allocated and how they're structured as assignments.
A new allocation engine: The old peer review system was static and used students for pairing. Instructors had to manually trigger allocations, but students who submitted late risked being left out. The new allocation engine changes all of that. It works automatically and dynamically, assigning peer reviews based on actual submissions instead of enrollment status. As long as a student submits before the available-until date, they'll be paired. The engine continuously updates, balances workload across the class, and removes the need for instructors to babysit the process.
For edge cases like a student who needs a specific pairing or a section that needs to stay together, instructors can add (manual) allocation rules. These let instructors force or prevent specific pairings without abandoning the benefits of automated processes altogether. Think of rules as the exception, not the default. Allocation still happens without rules, but they’re there if/when needed.
Points and due dates for peer reviews: Peer reviews have never had their own due date or grade in Canvas. That made it easy for students to treat it as optional, because structurally, it was. It also made it hard for students to find as it didn’t show up in many of the expected places for assignments. Now, instructors can set a separate peer review due date, giving students time to receive submissions and complete reviews before a distinct deadline. Points can be assigned to the peer review itself, surfaced in the gradebook and SpeedGrader as a separate item. Instructors decide the grading format: points-based, complete/incomplete, or feedback-only through setting points to 0.
Want to see all of this in action? Here's a full walkthrough:
Link to video
What this looks like in practice
Say you're running a writing-intensive course with 80 students. Here is how the experience will feel now:
- Automated Engine: Simply set your review due date after the submission deadline and assign points; the engine handles the rest. No more manual pairings or teacher intervention.
- Clear Visibility: Peer reviews appear as distinct items in to-do lists, modules, the assignments, and the grades page with their own deadlines and grades. Students see these reviews as required work.
- Seamless Grading: Reviewers are assigned automatically as they begin their reviews, and you can evaluate performance, separately and directly in SpeedGrader.
One instructor in our Early Access Program put it this way: "I think they're going to love that there's two separate due dates and points... I appreciate that you're listening to instructors and what they want."
The response from other EAP participants across the board matched that energy. Here are what some of our participants shared:
- "I find the tools for preparation and setup to be well designed and easy and intuitive to use. This is a clear improvement." - EAP participant
- "I really appreciated some of the settings... the possibilities for a deadline for the review itself. Very good. Overall very glad for the improvements. Very excited for these improvements." - EAP participant
- "I'm excited that it's all in that one place... it's got a lot of promise. I could see myself really loving this." - EAP participant
A few things to know before you start
This feature requires four feature flags to be enabled. Your Canvas site admin will need to turn on all of the following; if any are missing, the feature won't work as expected:
- Peer Review Allocation and Grading (peer_review_allocation_and_grading), the main feature flag; must be enabled at the Site Admin level
- Assignment Enhancements – Student (assignments_2_student)
- Enhanced Rubrics (enhanced_rubrics)
- Performance and Usability Upgrades for SpeedGrader (platform_service_speedgrader)
The Peer Review Allocation and Grading main flag is hidden and must be enabled at the Site Admin level; sub-account admins and instructors can't see or enable it. We recommend starting with course-level enablement (unlocked) to pilot the workflow with a few instructors before rolling out broadly.
A few current limitations worth knowing: inter-group peer review (group-to-group or intra-group assignments) isn't fully supported in this release, nor are peer review sub-assignments in the Canvas mobile app. Because the allocation engine is dynamic and allocations are optimized in real time as students are completing reviews, there's no fixed list view of all pairings; allocation data surfaces in context instead: in the gradebook, in SpeedGrader, and in the allocations tray.
Get started
If you're ready to enable this for your institution and/or start using it, check out the FAQ first, and visit the Canvas Community guides for instructor-facing documentation.
Have questions or feedback from your first use of these enhancements or want to share what you'd like to see next? Share them here, in the Canvas Community; we're reading everything!
