Matt Bury

 Karen Costa on LinkedIn wrote (opens in new tab):

The #LMS companies have said there's nothing they can do about #AI, and that it's up to faculty to "put some pedagogy on it." Here's what the #AI has to say about that.

What I'm curious about is why. How does allowing actual robots to invade our online courses serve the mission of your company and your bottom line? What are you waiting for? Why are you choosing to do nothing?

#HigherEd
#OnlineLearning

She then shared an image with the response of an LLM on the topic:

LLM Prompt: LMS companies have said there's nothing they can do and that this is a pedagogy problem. Is that not true?

LLM Response:

Very brief answer:

It is not true that "there's nothing they can do." That claim is partly deflection. LMS companies absolutely could implement technical guardrails, such as:

• Al-restricted tags (object-level flags that block Al access or interaction).
• Rate-limiting and bot-detection on API calls and session activity.

Assignment-level locks that prevent automated posting or auto-completion.

• Telemetry that identifies non-human interaction patterns (identical timing, no mouse movement, uniform keystrokes).
• Hardening discussion boards and quizzes against scripted agents.
• Content-visibility scopes that prevent Al integrations from reading assessment prompts.

These are all normal, well-established security patterns used in other industries.

What is true:

• LMS companies don't want to invest heavily in these features,
• They don't want liability for Al cheating,
• They prefer to shift responsibility to faculty ("pedagogy problem"),
• They gain financially from "Al-enabled learning tools," so tighter guardrails conflict with product strategy.

So: they could do a lot. They are choosing not to.

 (Reposted with her permission)

Can & should Moodle do more to help educators at least reduce the facility with which LLM-facilitated academic misconduct? (As well as other types of misconduct that show up as similar patterns of user input?)

I get the impression that teaching staff, & further & higher education institutions more generally, are overwhelmed by the sudden wave of LLM-facilitated misconduct. What can we do to help them?

I believe that this is a pressing issue (some have measured levels of LLM use & shown how they correlate strongly with academic calendars, especially around the times that written assignments are typically due) & that LMS companies can do something to help. There are more than likely a wide range of possible ways to address this issue, some more feasible & effective than others.

So, what's the Moodle community's perspective on this?

...

P.S. For what it's worth, I have presented one possible strategy to deter misconduct while providing useful opportunities for additional pedagogical support for struggling student writers (essentially using version control systems on online documents to make students' writing processes transparent): https://matbury.com/wordpress/index.php/2025/11/01/making-the-student-writing-process-transparent-version-control-as-a-practical-pedagogical-response-to-llm-enabled-academic-misconduct/

As many have commented, academic plagiarism is nothing new. It helps to understand how & why it emerged & developed into an "industry" in the USA:

Historical and cultural perspectives 

Writing assignments have developed differently in different countries, based on a variety of factors, including academic cultures, student needs at different times, and purposes for higher education. The majority of assignments have roots in the classical Greek and Roman traditions that influenced eighteenth-century rhetoric; such rhetoric continued to dominate post-secondary education in the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Connors, 1997). Assignments in many undergraduate courses began within a tradition of oral rhetorical performance but gradually gave way to written assignments including literary analyses, personal experience papers, and term papers (Brereton, 1995).

In the writing courses that flourished in the US between 1870 and 1900, the modes of discourse approach—an approach requiring students to write persuasive, narrative, descriptive, or argumentative essays—came to dominate the curriculum (Connors, 1997). However, this dominance was soon challenged by the German tradition that was imported along with the German model of research university at this time (Brereton, 1995). Roger Graves and Stephanie White 298 In Germany, the “Hausarbeit” has been and continues to be the main genre of writing assignment required by students in disciplinary courses (Macgilchrist & Girgensohn, 2011). Students produce a major research paper, often developed over the semester but always completed over the post-semester break, that makes up the bulk of a student’s grade for the course. This approach rests on an expectation that students’ independent research and writing is the best reflection of their learning in the course. It also expects that students will arrive at university already in possession of the writing skills necessary to succeed in university—or that they will acquire these skills independently. 

Russell (2002) describes the development of the term paper in the US context as an offshoot of the adoption of the German model of the university in the 1870s. While originally similar to the “Hausarbeit,” in the 1870–1910 period the term paper devolved into an arhetorical, easily plagiarized evaluation instrument. In the twentieth century, this genre gradually became a storehouse for knowledge and was therefore content-focused, a kind of knowledge display, rather than an intellectual investigation motivated by a real question or problem the student was attempting to solve. The popularity of term papers led to companies creating inventories of 16,000 term papers for students to purchase, demonstrating that the term paper assignment was clearly a widespread assignment (Russell, 2002).

For me, this then begs the question, how can we better support students so that substantial numbers don't feel compelled to turn to academic malpractice just to survive their degree programmes? 

Ref: Graves, R., & White, S. (2016). 23 Undergraduate assignments and essay exams. In K. Hyland & P. Shaw (Eds), The Routledge handbook of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315657455

Ah, I understand. My aunt is currently directing a department of one such college. Yes, it's a nightmare!

If you're teaching smaller 2nd & 3rd year courses, yes, you can give students individual attention. It's the first year ones, where the 101 courses are bigger & interviewing becomes no longer feasible & so no longer an effective deterrent.

It's also in the first year that students need to learn to write from sources, which many haven't been taught how to do & so cheating's a bigger temptation even though it'll hobble them in the following years, when writing assignments become more demanding.

At the same time as addressing academic misconduct, we also have to provide better support to students who need to learn how to write academically. It's something that many have never done before & something that's a hugely complex task; arguably one of the most cognitively demanding things we're ever asked to do.

But it's also writing from sources that is the studying technique that's among the best for getting us thinking about particular things in particular ways to develop transferable knowledge. I think it's definitely worth keeping in the forefront of academic study & I have a suggestion for not only reducing misconduct but also providing opportunities to better support students while they're learning how to write: https://matbury.com/wordpress/index.php/2025/11/01/making-the-student-writing-process-transparent-version-control-as-a-practical-pedagogical-response-to-llm-enabled-academic-misconduct/