Mitigating the use of AI with Dropbox

Shobhana Xavier, School of Religion This is a use of Dropbox as a tool to mitigate AI use in RELS163. There were 190 students enrolled with 4 TAs.

Article Category

Academic Integrity

AI mitigation

Assignment

Dropbox

This assignment mitigates AI. This was shared with me by my colleague Maxie Bai-Martin from Conestoga college, which I adapted for my courses where I have students write essays.

This assignment works well for writing and analysis-based learning outcomes, which are a part of most courses I teach.

It is important to me that students critically think through primary texts or visual images and so I use this mitigation step as well as other steps in my course to stress that students work through ideas themselves.

Yes, this assignment is successful, as it encourages to students to work on the paper in advance. Students who follow the spirit of the assignment work through multiple drafts of the paper that you can see on the history of the document. This really rewards students who put the effort in.

One aspect that can be overwhelming is that when students share the edit access to the OneDrive document it does go to your inbox. I move these emails into a separate folder to manage my inbox. However, when I did this with nearly 200 hundred students, this became particularly overwhelmingly for my teaching assistants and myself. So, this is something to be mindful for in larger classes.

Additional Information

Sinners (2025) Film Analysis Assignment Prompt (247KB, PDF)

None.

Small classes, seminar classes that have writing essays or writing assignments are ideally situated for the use of the OneDrive to mitigate the use of AI.