Translator issue in Discussions

[dvuillaume]

We have a concern about possible cheating in a discussion board.  A Spanish teacher pointed out that certain discussion posts have a strange colored box around student responses.  We are wondering why this might be,

Example:

Compared to this:

[kona]

It's hard to say definitively without being able to recreate the box, but no, this is not something you would normally see in a Canvas discussion. I'd recommend trying to create the box by using various online translation services and then using this information talk to the student directly.

[Stef_retired]

dvuillaume‌, have you or the teacher looked at the HTML for this discussion reply? Sometimes it turns out that the explanation is benign. Because I disable editing of discussion replies, I encouraged my students to compose their replies in an external application with more robust editing and spell-checking capability, and then copy-and-paste their nicely composed responses into the Canvas discussion reply field. On occasion, weird garbage code tags along with the copy-paste. Whenever that happened, I asked the student to let me know what was up.

But  @kona ‌ is right: try out some common translators to see if you can recreate this.

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello there, dvuillaume‌...

I noticed that there hasn't been any new activity in this particular discussion topic since you posted on May 12th and received replies from both  @kona ‌ and stefaniesanders‌ later that day.  While I don't have an answer for you myself, have you had a chance to review the responses you've received from Kona and Stefanie?  If so, did either of them help to answer your question?  Or, are you still looking for some assistance with your initial question?  If you feel that one of the above answers is "Correct", please go ahead and mark it as such.  However, if you still have any questions related to your initial posting, please let us know that by posting a message below so that members of the Canvas Community can continue to help you out.  For now, since there hasn't been any new activity in this thread for quite a while and since we've not heard from you, I am going to mark your question as "Assumed Answered", but that won't prevent you or others from posting additional replies below.  I hope that's okay with you, Desi.  Looking forward to hearing from you soon!

[simond]

Student has used Google Translate

[SusanNiemeyer]

I teach ESL, and I know that quite of my online students are using Google Translate. Some are using it for a word or two; others are using it to do all of their written work. There's no good way to figure out who's using Google Translate based on how their writing shows up in Canvas.

Instead, I look for work that is "too good to be true."  There are also interesting quirks that come with translations from different languages. For example, anything coming from Spanish will have pronoun errors. There are definite limitations to teaching remotely. I can't wait until we're back in a physical classroom, and we can go back to paper and pencil (with no phones or devices in sight!)