Assignment comment layout

[KarlijnvanA]

Hi all,

When you write a comment giving feedback to a student, you can add spaces, use enter, bullet points to make the text more readable. When you post this comment, this lay-out is still visible for the poster.

But the student receives a flat text. They navigate to the assignment and can take a look at the feedback on the right side of the screen, where it sort of slides into view from the right side of the screen. And the lay out has disappeared.

Take a look at the file attached to this post for an example.

I've already checked browsers, are they up to date, the works. That does not seem to be the problem. Is this a bug type thing in Canvas or a setting or? How can I make this pretty?

Thanks in advance!

[VPundir]

SpeedGrader comments are flat text, and will not retain the kinds of formatting that you have mentioned.

If you are particular concerned about how the comments look, you may type them in a text (Notepad) or Word file, and upload that: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-leave-feedback-comments-for-student-sub... 

[KarlijnvanA · Accepted solution]

Hi @VPundir , thanks for this.

Whereas this is certainly an option, it sort of defeats the purpose if you ask me. Speedgrader is a fantastic tool, adding comments is a great feature, but having to prepare your feedback in a document, save it to your computer and upload it to the tool, for every student you grade, sounds like a lot of work. I can see why Instructure would not put a full Rich Content Editor in the comment section, but some basic lay out (just <p></p>) would help a lot.

I'll put in an RFC 🙂

[VPundir]

Agreed, failing an actual Rich Content Editor, a text box that parses and executes markdown, HTML or even BBCode would be useful.

[VPundir]

@KarlijnvanA Did you ever end up posting a feature request for this in Ideas? It may be good to share a link here so that people that find this discussion can go there and upvote the idea.

[TamaraPavlock]

This is certainly an issue for me too; why is it that a simple copy and paste will not hold formatting? Too much time is spent reformatting on every single copy and paste in the comment section.