The IL Support Centre has recently received a few tickets over the last two days reporting an issue in the feedback editor of the assignment within Blackboard. (Bb Annotate is the inline grading tool within Blackboard.)
The issue experienced by some faculty has been described in the following steps:
- After editing feedback for an assignment, the instructor clicks “save”.
- Sometimes the additional feedback entered appears to have disappeared. When this occurs, the submitted assignment can be observed reloading.
- If the instructor closes the assignment completely and checks the feedback, the disappeared content has actually been saved as intended. (Note that clicking on the next assignment will not produce the same results – the instructor must close the assignment under review before proceeding to the next assignment to observe the saved feedback.)
As a workaround, we recommend writing all comments on a Word file and then copying and pasting them into the editor instead of frequently editing. This also helps instructors avoid the frustration of the pages timing out while entering feedback.
According to Anthology, Bb Annotate reloads after approximately 5 minutes upon clicking ‘Save Changes’.
We have reported this to our LMS Administrator and contacted the vendor’s development team for support. They will fix this issue in the future release, and we will confirm that fix in our Monthly Blackboard Updates.