[SpeedGrader] Allow HTML in Assignment Comments

[cranero]

In providing feedback to students in the Assignment Comments area of an assignment, I often provide URLs to students.  Currently, the comments area is text only so students cannot click on the URL to go to the website.  Instead, they need to manually copy and paste the URL to make it work.  It would be nice to have some HTML functionality here.

[MvonM]

Good morning, I would like to echo the comments of those above. As an instructor, it would be very beneficial to be able to link other websites, or even pages within our Canvas course in feedback. This would lead to engaging feedback as well as a one-stop-shop for students when viewing their feedback. 

[jmusic]

Be able to put hyperlinks directly in comments for assignments, so that students can click on those links directly. This would be especially useful with course materials (e.g. my comments to a student is to review the material found in this "Module", with a link to that module), OR I frequently post video comments that I upload to Panopto (for file size issues), and to be able to link to those directly.

[lenz]

OMG, are you listening to us at all, CANVAS Developers?????  Certainly 5 years of discussion are enough to convince you that we need AT LEAST

• formatting
• graphics
• live links

in our Speedgrader comments.  

Giving us a forum to suggest changes/features and then ignoring what is being said wastes our time, if not yours.

CR Lenz-Hackett

@nathan_franck , @JSahms , @grant_larsen 

PS  I'm afraid to mention this for fear that it will then disappear, but here goes.  Colleagues who aren't emoji adverse and are using Windows:  You CAN insert emojis (and special characters, math symbols, and some other stuff) into your Speedgrader comments (and other places in CANVAS) by pressing the Windows key and tapping period (.) key.  

In fact, you can use this key combination almost everywhere (not just in CANVAS).  It's not live links, text formatting, or any of the other things we want, but it's something.  🔸Don't tell anybody... 🔸

iOS/Apple folks can do something similar, I'm sure.

[danaleeling]

At this point I would be happy if the comments in Speedgrader retained carriage returns/line feeds. Longer comments with paragraph breaks lose those paragraph breaks creating massive blocks of text that no student can wade through. There is a strong negative impact on learning because of the lack of paragraph break capabilities. @lenz is correct, Unicode including emojis are supported so I use symbols such as 🔵 as visual identifiers of where paragraph breaks should have appeared. The really odd thing is that the paragraph breaks are still there, but the widget in Speedgrader is not displaying them to the students. If students access the Submission details from the List view in their Dashboard, then the paragraph returns are retained. For more details see Canvas submission details screen displays line breaks.