Teaching with Generative AI
There are many ways that you and your students can use generative AI to enhance and improve learning, including:
- Generating writing prompts to help students develop their writing skills. The prompts can be tailored to individual student needs and interests.
- Designing course content, including learning objectives, assignments, and rubrics.
- Generating real-world scenarios to stimulate classroom discussion or even write multiple versions of a story in different genres for students to compare.
- Supporting language learning by generating conversation prompts or providing instant translation services.
- Providing virtual writing assistance to help students with writing tasks, such as brainstorming ideas, outlining, and proofreading.
- Engaging in pair coding to generate, and improve upon, computer programming code through iterative conversation with a human programmer.
However, because of generative AI’s ability to generate answers to prompts and problems, such as writing essays, solving math problems, developing HTML code, etc., there are areas you may need to evaluate if you want to ensure students are not using generative AI.
Authentic assessments have historically been promoted as a way for students to “authentically” demonstrate their knowledge and skills in a more open-ended and real-world manner than rigid, traditional assessments.
However, some authentic assessments, such as projects, papers, or presentations, can be more easily produced by generative AI than traditional assessments such as tests or quizzes, which may include closed-ended questions and greater supervision.
There are two major ways to respond to the presence of generative AI technology when using authentic assessments: prevent students from using AI or encourage students to use AI.
Preventing AI Usage
Preventing students from accessing Generative AI tools in an authentic assessment is very difficult. AI detection software has proven to be unreliable. Some educators are choosing to scale-down their authentic assessments to a more traditional, monitored format.
Assessments that focus on student strengths and/or AI weaknesses may discourage students from relying on AI. Some examples include:
- Ask students to share their personal feelings or experiences.
- Include an oral or multimedia presentation with a Q&A segment.
- Create assessments with smaller components that work together to form a final project.
- Consider projects that involve data collection or experimentation.
- Add assessment components based on a classroom discussion or a specific context unavailable to AI.
While relying on AI detection services is not advisable, there are a number of helpful resources from Turnitin to assist in discussing suspected cases of generative AI use with your students, including:
Encouraging AI Usage
Free, robust Generative AI tools are now used in real-world professional settings. Therefore, it may be helpful to prepare students to use these tools effectively to think with them and not think for them. Additionally, it may be impossible to prevent students from accessing this technology. Educators can choose to embrace this change and ask students to perform tasks where generative AI use is part of the process.
Examples of assessments that require students to use AI tools include:
- Ask students to craft a prompt that will generate a specific output.
- Have students analyze an AI output for factual errors or fictional responses invented by the AI (hallucinations).
- Ask students to compare the outputs of different AI tools.
- Have students make critical improvements to an AI-generated outputs and document their work.
Keep Students Informed
Whichever approach you decide, keeping students informed of your expectations is crucial. Consider adding a syllabus statement that clearly details if, how, and when the use of AI technology is appropriate in your course.
The policy should state what usage is or isn’t allowed and what are the consequences for violating the policy. If AI usage is allowed, faculty must consider privacy concerns as well.
Below are sample statements prohibiting or encouraging the use of AI.
Sample Statement Prohibiting Use of AI-generated Material
All work submitted for this course must be your own original production. Use of artificial intelligence (AI) to generate material is strictly prohibited. Submission of material generated by AI will be considered a violation of the University’s academic integrity policy. This includes AI-generated material that you have summarized or edited.
Sample Statement Encouraging Use of AI-generated Material
You are responsible for the content of any work submitted for this course. Use of artificial intelligence (AI) to generate a first draft of an assignment is permitted, but you must review and revise any AI-generated material before submission. In addition, you are required to be transparent about your use of AI-generated material by following citation and documentation guidelines provided in this course. Keep in mind that while AI generators can be useful tools, they are prone to factual errors, incorrect or fabricated citations, and misinterpretations of abstract concepts. Utilize them with caution.
The following links provide additional examples, templates, and resources for crafting a syllabus statement on AI.
Generative AI raises concerns about intellectual property and attribution. While the answers to these questions are still being worked out, it’s advisable to require students to be transparent about when and how they use AI-generated material in their work. Some tentative guidelines for how to cite and document AI-generated material can be found on these pages:
