Instructors are reporting students pasting AI-generated responses as their replies to Canvas Discussions. This is discouraging the instructors from using the feature at all. Discussion Boards will become a useless, outdated feature if there is no attempt to address this.
Give instructors the option to disable cut & paste on a per-discussion-topic basis. Sometimes they will not want to do this, because cutting and pasting does not always signify academic honesty. But sometimes, this barrier alone will be enough motivation for the student to simply type their own response. This will likely be used in scenarios when the response is not expected to be long or complex. Similar ideas have been suggested for Quizzes ( [New Quizzes] Disable cut and paste - Instructure Community - 583740 ), and Text-Entry Assignments ( [Assignments] Prevent Copy/Paste in Text Entry - Instructure Community - 600878 ), suggesting that this is a global issue that needs to be addressed, rather than a feature-specific issue. I believe that the best solution would be to provide teachers with more options to customize the student experience whenever student input is expected: teachers should be able to indicate whether they want students to have the full RCE, a limited RCE, or a simple plain text box. The ability to disable cut & paste should be another option. Finally, this exact idea was suggested in 2023 ( [Discussions] Text-entry option that prevents copy... - Instructure Community - 578901 ) but it was marked as "Will Not Consider" because "Discussions Redesign is beginning to address this issue" but I do not see how that is the case. Would be happy to hear more.
