Ability to Provide Quality Feedback for Assignments (Audio; Video; & Annotations for All File Types)

As an educator, providing clear feedback while grading is an essential step in the cycle of learning for the student.


With the increase in online learning/hybrid learning, there is even more of a need to give teachers an efficient and complete way to give feedback to students. Many if not all assignments are being submitted digitally and teachers are not able to give the written, detailed feedback they once could with a hard copy submission.

Presently, when there is a file submission teachers can annotate, BUT this is LIMITED to certain file types (word and pdf only, I believe). Many students are uploading picture, audio, and video files.

I suggest the following:

  1. Allow annotation on ALL file types.

  2. Build the ability to natively record an audio comment.

  3. Build the ability to natively record a video comment/annotation.

  • Trey Hoos
  • Jul 23 2020
  • Under consideration
  • Attach files
  • Megan Day commented
    16 Nov, 2023 07:36pm

    Any updates on this? Definitely need more options for providing assignment feedback!

  • Nancy Kierstead commented
    26 Apr, 2022 02:17pm

    Is there any work around upgrading the annotation tool? Our teachers are jumping ship.


  • Melissa Battis commented
    29 Oct, 2021 04:09pm

    It would also be good if we could add an attachment file to the comments that a teacher gives.

  • Angela Addison commented
    24 May, 2021 05:03pm

    Hi @Anson Kendall, @Ben Leddy is the PM on LMS now so I'll let him update on the timing for the new faculty assignment details being released!

  • anson kendall commented
    24 May, 2021 03:32pm

    @Angela Addison, We are making plans for next school year and wondering when this will be released or a demo may be available? Is it similar to this:

    https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048016153-Annotating-Documents#:~:text=Box%20Annotations%20enables%20you%20to,a%20document%20in%20Box%20Preview.

    Do you anticipate, notificiations for teachers & students? Will numeric grades and written feedback be viewable in the Gradebook/student progress?


    Thanks!

  • Angela Addison commented
    30 Jul, 2020 08:33pm

    @Trey Hoos I saw that too! I was excited. What I wasn't clear on though was if it was actually a different product install that has to be done on the client side, I got into reading further but then was derailed with meetings this afternoon. But will dig in a little more. Fingers crossed that the upgrade itself takes care of a lot of our issues. I'm actually wondering too, (one of the calls I just got off also mentioned a recorder that launched in-app) since there seems to be a TinyMCE plug in for just about everything if there's one already out there for audio recorder I'll do some looking into that. The hard part of course is that they end up charging for plug ins once they're out of beta so that ends up presenting a different set of issues.

  • Trey Hoos commented
    30 Jul, 2020 06:23pm

    @Angela Addison I think that would be a work around for right now. It would be nice to look at simplifying the process later with a native recorder.

    Attaching a file would be nice because we could potentially do more with our feedback that way.

    @Bryan Lorenzo - I was scanning the Box website and it looks like they are planning freeform mark up options on all clients including apple pencil for the second half of 2020 (https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048016153-Annotating-Documents)

  • Bryan Lorenzo commented
    30 Jul, 2020 04:15pm

    Hi Angie - one thing that is needed for sure for our teachers to move away from Showbie is the ability to annotate with an Apple Pencil on the submission. Also, Showbie has a native iOS app which makes grading super fast!

    Blackabud should definitely take a look at how Showbie works as well as the annotation features Showbie has. They are ahead in this area. Its no wonder its used by over 3 million teachers and students worldwide.

  • Angela Addison commented
    30 Jul, 2020 04:01pm

    Hi guys, we have a couple of improvements to the assignment evaluation process that I'm hoping will help here. We will be adding the ability to do back and forth commenting instead of just one assignment comment to the student. So that you could do things like - send feedback on a submission for them to correct work, resubmit with changes, get questions and comments back from the student. We also have a Box (which is our 3rd party annotation tool) upgrade planned in the next couple of sprints. Box's list of file types has increased extensively since we last upgraded. I have dev looking into if there are any technical limitations with us being able to support all of their file types: https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043695794-Viewing-Different-File-Types-Supported-in-Box-Content-Preview#FileTypesSupported. So the one piece not in our plans already that's noted here is the ability to natively record audio feedback. I don't think we'd be able to build a native tool for capturing that in the time that we have to redo assignment details but, would this work: if we allowed you to attach a file to your feedback (either in the comments - insert file as a comment instead of typing text, or as an overall paperclip on the assignment evaluation that the student could then see on their side) and you would still used another tool to record your audio file but then could upload it - would that do it? That's something I think we could accomplish.

  • Trey Hoos commented
    30 Jul, 2020 02:54pm

    @Bryan Lorenzo agreed! Without the ability to give quality feedback, receiving assignments electronically does not do much for the learning process.

  • Bryan Lorenzo commented
    23 Jul, 2020 09:40pm

    A major overhaul is needed in this area. We’d love to stop using Showbie and have everything in one place. Please take a look at how well Showie let’s you annotate.