When deciding how to approach GAI use in your courses, it is important to consider both the relevance of your Course Learning Outcomes given the ability of GAI to automate many human activities, and how use of GAI will affect student acquisition of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions relevant in your field. Prohibition of GAI use is one tact that you may choose. This may be a fool’s errand, since students are already using GAI in their work. If you don’t feel that altering learning outcomes is appropriate, and if students cannot achieve the desired learning outcomes when using GAI, a policy of GAI prohibition is most aligned with your goals.

First Steps: #

1. Integrate academic integrity education into your course. Establish a course-wide framework for integrating academic integrity instruction. This is vital to obtaining student valuation for following the rules that you establish in your course for GAI use. Consult CITL resources for integrating academic integrity in your teaching.
2. Test assignments. Test your assignments, including prompts and quiz or test questions, to see how various GAI tools perform on them. In addition to ChatGTP and Microsoft Copilot, different tools may be more relevant in different disciplines and for different tasks. Mahsima Dastan maintains a comprehensive public list of GAI tools on GitHub that may be helpful in assessing what students may have access to. You may also wish to access TurnItIn.com’s AI Misuse Checklist, which may help to frame your thinking as you review your assignments.
3. Adjust assignments. Modify your assignments to make it more challenging for GAI tools to complete the work on behalf of students. As GAI tools continue to improve in rhetorical accuracy, creativity, fluency of output language, and both the reliability and validity of their responses, creating assignments that fully prohibit student use of them will become exceedingly difficult. In these early years of the tools, there are design choices that can make it more challenging for students to use an AI for their coursework. More importantly, these choices can incentivize students to see the value of doing their own work. Although these approaches can be effective, they may pose accessibility challenges. Not all students have the same resources or abilities, and some tasks may not be feasible for all students. Therefore, it’s crucial to offer flexibility and choices in assignments whenever possible, and to consider providing alternatives that achieve the same learning outcomes. 

References and Resources: #

McDonald, N., Johri, A., Ali, A., & Hingle, A. (2024). Generative artificial intelligence in higher education: Evidence from an analysis of institutional policies and guidelines (arXiv:2402.01659). arXiv. 

Cengage, (2023) 8 Ways to Prevent Students From Cheating With AI

Kelly, K.J. 2023. Teaching Actual Student Writing in an AI World, Inside Higher Education, January 18, 2023.