That's helpful. I see what you're looking for now. Normally if say produce a copy, edit that. Ofc, giving this is education, that's probably copyrighted isn't it?
Incidentally it looks like by default Okular saves annotations in an external XML file. I have not verified this though.
You might look at Xournal++ also.
I was definitely confused before. I'd only used it for form completion and not annotation which apparently works differently.
Best of luck Internet friend and thanks for the clarification!