Comments Library - Am I missing something here?

[jpmitchell]

It's a great idea to have a bank of common comments, something I have long used ClipAngel for, but it appears that you can only enter one comment from the library and when you do it makes everything else you have written disappear forever.

I learned this when I wrote several pars. of detailed comments and watched them vanish when I pasted in a note about correct formatting from the library.

Is that how this thing is supposed to work? If so, this new feature isn't worthless--it's actively harmful. Is there a way to disable it?

[Chris_Hofer]

@jpmitchell ...

I'm not exactly sure if the comment library is supposed to work that way or not.  Something tells me that what you described is accurate...as I somehow remember a different conversation here in the Community a long while back, but I don't remember exactly where it was that I saw it.  ☹️

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Is there a way to disable it?

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Yes...there is a way to disable this...but it is at the Canvas account level.  This means that if your Canvas administrator turns it off, it will be turned off for every course in that account.  While you might not want to use it, other of your fellow instructors might really like using it and would suddenly wonder what happened to it ... if it was turned off. 

The Feature Option at the account level is called "Comment Library", and the description is, "Allows users to save and search frequently used feedback in a library of comments to be used in SpeedGrader."  The options are either "Enabled" or "Disabled".

I hope this will help a bit.  Sing out if you have any other questions...thanks!

[SusanNiemeyer]

I use the Comments Library quite a bit. Mainly, I have comments set up for different homework assignments. Then as I'm reading the homework, I'll start with the relevant comment and then edit it. As you said, it's only possible to insert one comment, and that insertion has to happen BEFORE you type anything into the box. 

I like the Comments Library, but it's an imperfect tool. Rather than disable it, I'd suggest that you simply ignore its existence if you don't find it helpful.