Line Breaks Disappear in Quiz Comments

[burkay_ozturk]

When I enter comments in the "Assignment Comments" section of a quiz through the speedgrader, line breaks in the comment disappear after I submit the comment and the comment appears as a wall of text. (See the attached images.)

I tried viewing the comments in the student view and through three different browsers. The result is the same.

Until this afternoon, line breaks were preserved in my comments. However, now I see that all of them are gone, even the ones in the comments from previous semesters.

Was there a recent update that caused this? Also, how can I fix it? It is really not acceptable that we have no ability to create line breaks in our comments, and creating separate pdf or txt files for comments and attaching them is not feasible given the number of assignments I have to comment on.

[AvaWan]

Hi there,

I've also been marking and have encountered this exact issue. I thought I'd share what I've found.

Canvas just deployed an update where staff members will now be able to use RTF formatting in their comments. Just like you, for about an hour, I was frustrated that I couldn't enter any line breaks at all. It seems that the feature has fully deployed and our ability to use line breaks are back, but you're right that the update has still broken all comments that were made previously. I have to go back and manually edit my comments with the new text editor.

I hope this helps. This is quite annoying and this seems like something Canvas should have accounted for.

[jdohert1]

We have the exact same issue. Others at my school have noticed that the comments box now includes options for rich-text (italics, etc.). Probably something got messed up while adding that feature. But I would certainly trade italics for some line breaks! 

I'm weeks into the beginning of my semester and have returned comments that include a line-by-line walk through of calculations. Students have confirmed that in their view, the comments are also garbled into a big blob. So, they are unable to see the math help that I'm trying to give them. 

I don't think it's the instructor's job to change the way we give feedback (e.g., with the pdf fix mentioned above). It's the LMS's job to support this basic issue of text formatting.