[Discussions] Allow instructor to block/moderate student from discussion board

[jolaine]

I have an instructor who says a student is repeatedly posting inappropriate content in a Discussion Board, even after the instructor has given guidance as to appropriate posting.  Currently, the only way to control this is for the instructor to go in and delete the offending messages, but by that time, the rest of the students may have seen it.

There should be a way for an instructor to set the discussion so that it must be moderated (posts don't appear to the students until the Teacher/TA has approved them) or that a particular student can be blocked from the discussion. 

[cholling]

We ran into that years ago using a different LMS. The students were directed to research certain topics that are now controversial but at the time were accepted. The school's filters blocked all of them.

[thompsli]

Canvas is used by many different populations across many different age levels and languages. (I only mention the languages part because it makes word filters much harder - the ages and populations are much more relevant.)

I use Canvas to teach math to students in middle and high school within a larger public school district. Being a public k-12 school, we serve...the public. All of it. Any of it. Even if you're incredibly rude, you still have the right to a free education where we teach you a bunch of stuff (including, if everyone is very lucky, how to be less rude) as long as you're the right age and live in our district.

Students end up in our online school for a wide variety of reasons, but one of them relevant to this discussion is behavioral struggles within their regular classroom. Most years, a few of my students have been expelled from their regular school (for things like making threats or distribution of drugs) and get math instruction from me online while sitting in a supervised environment in our alternative school for students who have been expelled. (The majority of my students are not in this situation, but my point is that my classes contain students in this situation as well.)

I am definitely not going to be able to kick them out of math class for swearing. I could make them re-do the assignment they swore in, but that's about it (and that may not even be the battle I pick, depending on the student).

For that matter, when I taught in a physical building, students would be gone for less than a week for things like grabbing my hand when I was reaching for the classroom phone to call security to have them removed. Then they'd be back in my class again. I've never worked in a situation where I could "fire" a student for anything less than bringing a weapon to school (in which case they'd go to an expulsion program like the ones I work with now, so I guess now I can't even "fire" them for that), and "swearing on a message board" is simply not going to get added to that list .

Also, the things  I'd most want to moderate aren't swearing, but situations where a student makes rude comments or threatening ones. "I'm going to beat you up, you smelly person, for your stupid comment" would not get caught by pretty much any word filter, but I'd be much more concerned about moderating/blocking a student who regularly replied that way to my other students than one who used some profanities while talking about their actual math assignment ("I finally figured out the [bad word] recursive form for the pattern, but I'm still stuck when trying to figure out a [stronger bad word] explicit form"). 

I guess my problem is I'm not trying to keep my general class "in line", I'm trying to provide a consequence for a single (at this point theoretical) student who has already crossed several lines but will be in my class for the rest of the year anyway. That consequence is less about punishing them than it is about making it harder for them to continue to disrupt or upset the class. Moderating their posts would be a good way to filter out their rude comments while letting any appropriate ones through.

This leaves aside the practical issues of tuning a word filter to be appropriate for each individual class, population, and assignment. A 3rd grade class that is supposed to be discussing "our favorite kinds of animals" probably would need a filter tuned differently than an upper-level college communication class discussing "the interaction of the first amendment and obscenity laws in the United States". 

[nixwhat]

I can see leaving proper medical terms out of the blacklist of words for a filter, but I still think it's a good starting point. Yes, some people may use alternate spellings to get around that, in which case they should get their first warning.  How many warnings should a person get before disciplinary action is taken?  I'm not sure but I would hope no more than 3. After being warned, if the behaviour continues, they should simply get a zero on the assignment. 

I guess I am getting a little off topic thinking of better preventative ways to deal with this, but honestly, I'm not even sure why I'm on this thread as it seems to be a teacher discussion and I'm only a 2nd-year student. 

I'll go ahead and upvote this for you though since you all seem to want to give this a try as a stand-alone new procedure. 

[bilquis_ghani]

Thank you for this suggestion, we are also looking for some way to moderate student contributions. It would also be really good to have a functionality which flags predefined hot words, with an email to a designated person. These could be profanity or seeking help. We have outward facing open courses using Canvas and while constructive feedback is highly valued, there are others that may take advantage of an open forum to harass other students, staff or the institution.

[devernej]

Your suggestion is so relevant to the world we live in today, and more specifically to today's classrooms. It is so important that students are empowered to use technology and that educators set parameters for using technology. However, students who disregard the rules and post inappropriate remarks can make a teacher wonder if the technology is a blessing or a curse. I had to confront students about using my Google classroom as a platform to chat with one another about things not even remotely related to the course.

Yes.There should be some Canvas feature in place for instructors to monitor student comments and enable us to check out student posts to make sure the content is post worthy and/or clean before other students are enabled to view. In my opinion, as a result of a teacher's autonomy in being able to monitor student posts, students would spend more time focusing on relevant curriculum content. Students would not only know that there posts are transparent to the adult in charge; but they would also know that the instructor has the power to reverse the curse of  inappropriate remarks.

[James]

I'm reading through this without having had to deal with the problem. I meet face to face in a college math course and so far have been able to handle rudeness by talking with the student -- or in one case, telling the two most prolific people in the class not to engage with each other. In other words, I probably don't understand all of the issues involved.

Still, something was said that sounded like it could be accomplished already. I'm exploring  @dmurphy1 's number 4 option where the instructor chooses which students to block.

It seems to me that if you want to block a particular student for whatever reason (egregious violations and multiple warnings or just because the student wore plaid on a Tuesday -- you decide), there are a couple of ways that you can do this. I'll admit that I haven't tested either of these suggestions with discussions, so they might need some refinement by the refined people here in the Community.

You can excuse the student from the discussion before they make their first post. The notes section of How do I excuse an assignment for a student in the Gradebook? has this paragraph:

When an assignment is excused, the assignment page and the student grade page will show the student that he or she has been excused from the assignment. Students cannot submit excused assignments.

If that is correct, then the student would not be able to submit a post. If the discussion were set to post-first, then they wouldn't be able to participate or even read the discussion. After the discussion is over, go in and change the excused grade to a 0.

The second approach is to use differentiated assignments. You go in and edit the discussion and add the student as an override. Set the dates, especially the available until date, to something that is already in the past. Then the student cannot go in and post. If it was a post first discussion, they would not be able to read what other people had written since they would never be able to make their first post.

Both of those require a graded discussion. If you have a non-graded discussion, then you may be able to create a new section called "Students banned from discussions" and one for "Students who are still in my good graces". You could go with something shorter or less overt as well. Separate the entire class into those two sections and then just assign the ungraded discussion to the "Good Graces" section. The ability to assign to a specific section became possible with the June 23, 2018, release. Unfortunately, you cannot assign an ungraded discussion to "Everyone except".

The section approach comes with some other issues. The biggest is that you may not have the ability to create them. There are others like all sections show up in the gradebook (subject to available space) and if you're not careful on naming, you might lose the real section a student is in.

If for some reason you want to allow students to see what others are writing but not post (as a means of modeling good behavior), then you can leave off the post-first requirement but use the differentiated assignment to make it so they can't post because their due dates are already over.

Whatever you do, make sure that the student knows what you're doing and why. If the grade changes from excused to zero and you haven't communicated and documented things, you're setting yourself up for a grade appeal.

[kona]

Per testing last week, if you excuse a student from a *discussion* they can still post to the discussion it just shows up as a non-graded discussion for them on the discussion and in tbthe gradebook. [For an assignment or quiz being excused does prevent them from submitting.]

Yet, James is correct that at any point you could technically differentiate the discussion and not include a specific student. This would keep the student from posting or even seeing the discussion. 

Kona

[cholling]

It's interesting to me that this conversation has come back around after a year. I like having the option of having a moderated discussion, which is why I voted it up way back when. However, I seem to have a different take on the more global aspect of this conversation than many others. I don't like obscene or inappropriate conversations, and it bothers me knowing that people -- particularly little children -- have read it, but it seems to me that it's no different than hearing it on the school playground. It will be read or heard and the impact can be a learning point for teacher and students alike. If the poster is not amenable to correction and altered directions, it seems to me to be no different than any other infraction of a classroom policy or behavior standard -- pull them aside, restrict privileges, send them to the principal's office (if they still do such things), whatever it takes to let the student know they were wrong, they didn't accept instruction, and there are penalties. But calling out inappropriate actions from one student doesn't seem to need changing the teacher's way of dealing with communication in the online classroom overall.

[jhoule]

I have also come across this issue with a student. Having teacher moderation would decrease the liability that schools and, by extension, Canvas might face with inappropriate content being posted without moderation.

[thompsli]

Which is why I'm advocating for being able to set specific specific students to "moderated" as such a valuable tool - it's a way for them to lose the privilege of unrestricted posting (because they weren't making appropriate choices) in a less drastic way than cutting them out of the discussion entirely (since the teacher can approve any of their comments that meet class communication standards, and they could even be on an agreement with the teacher that they could "earn" regular posting back after x weeks of appropriate comments or somesuch). Right now, we have various hacks to keep a disruptive student entirely out of a discussion, but nothing that's between letting them post unfiltered and keeping them from posting at all.