Disable document uploads

[aslabey]

Hi. I'm an instructional designer trying to help one of our faculty members that is getting frustrated with students uploading documents into Discussions instead of pasting their written work into the body of the reply. Canvas provides a setting to disable attachments, but students can still use the Upload Document option, which provides the same functionality. Is there a way to disable the ability for students to upload documents into Discussions entirely for a course? Why doesn't the option to disable attachments in Settings also disable the upload document option in the formatting toolbar...

The teacher's reasoning is that a lot of time is wasted opening documents to engage with student writing for the teacher and students responding to their peers. Directions to not upload documents have not been successful, as you can imagine.

[james_whalley]

@aslabey I do not believe there is a built in function for this. It would take custom coding and putting the course in it's own subaccount.

If I were the instructor, I would use this as an opportunity to help students learn to properly follow directions - a useful skill in this world. That should be easy enough if this is a graded discussion. If it is not a graded discussion, the instructor can think of other repercussions for not following instructors. No matter which way they decide to go, it seems like the importance of entering the text directly needs to be clearly communicated and students need to understand the weight of failing to follow instructions.

[aslabey]

I agree @james_whalley that directions need to be clear and students can use this as a learning opportunity when they don't follow directions. I'm sure my faculty member feels she has already tweaked her directions to get most students to follow them, but is getting tired of having a conversation with a few students every semester that don't follow those directions.

I would like to point out that Canvas has already provided an entire setting to disable attachments for Discussions. I think the fact that students can still use the Document Upload button to attach a file defeats the setting to disable attachments. Canvas went through the effort to create that setting; I went through the effort to find it; the teacher disabled attachments, and now students are still attaching files. Little bit of an oversight... you can see why I'm hesitant to push this back onto the instructor. From her perspective, the setting is broken, right?

[james_whalley · Accepted solution]

@aslabey That's fair. The instructor may want to check the Community Feature Ideas to see if this feature request is already out there. If not, I encourage her to put the idea out there.

[aslabey]

I'll do that for her. Thank you.

[DrBonnie]

I have the same issue. The original posts were back in July of 2024; has Canvas addressed the 'oversight' mentioned above? Can professors now expect the option for students to not upload files/documents in the discussion forum to be clearly visible and functional?