I have been teaching online with Blackboard Learn for several years. I have found the Box tool for inline grading to be so horrible that I have abandoned its use and instead download the student's document, add my comments in Word and save the file in both Word and PDF format. The additional PDF format is because I do not assume that all student have their settings in Word set to enable them to see the comment. They can't miss the comments in the PDF version. I use a grading rubric and in the feedback comments I refer to both the grading rubric and the copies of the document with comments added. I note that Blackboard has come up with a new inline grading system called Blackboard Annotate to replace Box, but my school has not yet implemented the new version. If it is a substantial improvement over Box, I may return to inline grading. My problems with Box were that after I highlighted text I would see that the highlight that saves was not the same as the one I intended. Also comments had a way of just disappearing before I finished them. In short, Box was very unstable and user hostile.
I have been teaching online with Blackboard Learn for several years. I have found the Box tool for inline grading to be so horrible that I have abandoned its use and instead download the student's document, add my comments in Word and save the file in both Word and PDF format. The additional PDF format is because I do not assume that all student have their settings in Word set to enable them to see the comment. They can't miss the comments in the PDF version. I use a grading rubric and in the feedback comments I refer to both the grading rubric and the copies of the document with comments added. I note that Blackboard has come up with a new inline grading system called Blackboard Annotate to replace Box, but my school has not yet implemented the new version. If it is a substantial improvement over Box, I may return to inline grading. My problems with Box were that after I highlighted text I would see that the highlight that saves was not the same as the one I intended. Also comments had a way of just disappearing before I finished them. In short, Box was very unstable and user hostile.
Box has been replaced with sonething that actualky works. Therefore I have returned to inline grsding instead of downloading files.