Can I combine all of a student's discussion work into one document?

[DanielBarwick]

I'd like to be able to review student discussion work for possible AI use. However, most student discussion posts are too short to be reviewed accurately. Is there a way in Canvas to see all of a student's posts from a course on one page, so that it could be copied and pasted into an AI detection platform? Thanks!

[Hildi_Pardo]

Hi @DanielBarwick 

I don't think there is a way to see all of a student's posts (from various discussions in a course) on one screen or page.

I only know of a way to see all of a student's posts in one particular discussion, if it is a graded discussion:

• You can learn more about grading a graded discussion in SpeedGrader.

[DanielBarwick]

Thanks, Hildi - I was afraid that might be the answer. 🙂

Dan

[Gabriel33]

You can see a few "recent" discussion posts on the student's user page, under "recent messages". I don't have a lot of discussions, so I don't know how many it shows, but at least 3.

Alternatively, if you have several distinct discussions, you may need to use the API to gather them all.

[DanielBarwick]

Thanks! How do you get to a student's user page? And what is "API"?

[Gabriel33]

For the user page, go to "People" on the left menu, click on a student's name on the table, and then again click on their name when it shows up on the right of the screen.

You will arrive at an URL like: https://[universityname].instructure.com/courses/[coursenumber]/users/[usernumber] (or https://canvas.[universityname].com/courses/[coursenumber]/users/[usernumber]), and at the bottom, you should see "Recent Messages", which includes their discussion posts.

For the API, that stands for "application programming interface", which is a way to ask the website (here, Canvas) to tell you something specifically, without the need for loading the whole interface. With the API and some code, you can ask Canvas to print out all the discussions from a given student. While it is a bit of work to get the first student's messages (whether writing the code or checking whether ChatGPT's code works), it it very easy to get the next 99 students.