More and more instructors find that students are using AI to generate, copy and paste all of their discussion posts and peer reviews into Canvas by Instructure, turning their Canvas discussions into a closed loop of AI-generated digital noise where no actual learning is taking place. However, including visual and collaborative elements naturally safeguards assignments against quick AI shortcuts, since AI struggles to replicate authentic, real-time human interaction. When students are asked to visually add and defend their ideas using stickies on a visual whiteboard, the focus shifts from a polished final product to a dynamic, authentic collaboration between peers.
Creating engaging discussions in the age of AI
Lucid discussion boards embedded right onto the Canvas page are an easy way to re-work your discussions and encourage students to share their original ideas and authentically interact with their peers. Lucid allows you to incorporate additional forms of engagement that can’t be copied from an AI.
Step#1: Rework your discussion questions
- Choose questions that focus on opinions, reflections, personal connections, and overall impact on their own personal learning moving forward. Avoid questions with a clear correct or incorrect answer students can get from an AI search.
- Encourage short, conversational style peer-to-peer comments. These are short, easy and reduce the urge for a student to look to AI to do the work.
- Incorporate authentic engagement that can’t be quickly generated by an AI such as: emoji reactions, highlighting, sentence stems, annotation symbols, etc.
Step #2: Create an engaging collaborative discussion template.
How to
- Open the template or create your own from scratch.
- Add your discussion prompt and customize the instructions.
- Review and customize the discussion symbols and sentence stems as needed.
- Determine how you want students to add their peer-to-peer comments.
- Option 1: “Add a Comment”
- Option 3: Use Stickies and Arrows
Step #3: Embed in Canvas
- Option 1: An ungraded activity on a Canvas Page
- Create a Canvas page
- Add the collaborative Lucid document by clicking on the black L in the RCE
- Publish once you are ready for students to start working
- Option 2: A graded Canvas assignment
- Create a Canvas assignment
- Add the collaborative Lucid document by clicking on the black L in the RCE (same as above)
- No data pulls into Speedgrader automatically when grading a collaborative Lucid activity, therefore you can choose from a couple submission type options:
- “No Submission” - Review and grade contributions using the Lucid board
- “File Upload” - Have students submit screenshots of their contributions
- “Text Entry” - Students submit a reflection and take aways from the discussion
- Avoid “Lucid” as the submission type. This is for independently completed activities not for collaborative discussions
How are encouraging authentic participation in your online discussions in this new age if AI?
