There seems to be a new feature for HTML assignment responses for teachers. I notice now that it is taking longer now to mark small work contributions by my students. Could there be an assignment option for form field or plain text responses? When marking assignments, this would reduce some of the DL overheads and increase reload time for new grading windows.
It was suggested that this feature could be turned on an off in the user preferences but that seems like an odd work around. The HTML editor is handy for forum posts and assignment descriptions but perhaps less so when submitting brief comments for assigments submitted.