Instructors and students alike must learn how to navigate the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in teaching and learning. Setting clear expectations is essential. Here we recommend resources to help you communicate about AI with your students.
Colorado State University articulates how to talk to students about ChatGPT in three steps: acknowledgement, inappropriate usage, and appropriate usage.
I like how this website provides a simple, high-level overview of how to have the AI conversation with your students. Use this website to structure your conversation, and see the other resources in this collection for support on what to say within that structure.
Monash University provides a list of actions that instructors can do now to help students understand when and how to use generative AI like ChatGPT.
This website provides great support in considering what you need to communicate to your students. I appreciate the clear action steps provided.
This academic skills kit from Newcastle University breaks down for students how AI can support their learning and what its limitations are.
If you are looking for a useful website to share with your students, consider this one. The language is student-facing, and the use of bulleted lists make it a quick and accessible read.
When viewing the output of a tool such as ChatGPT, Bing chat or Google Bard it is easy to think it has a level of understanding of the subject being written about. You may also think it is synthesising information in a critical way, paraphrasing and summarising content from multiple sources to build an argument, but that isn't the case.
There is great potential to use AI tools to support you throughout your education but we must remember there is a big difference between human and artificial intelligence. There is a limit to what AI tools can do although it is not always clear at first glance. AI tools available to us at this moment do not understand the content they generate or what those words or images mean in the real world.
Keeping in mind the purpose of assessment for and of your learning, will help you use your judgement about the appropriate use of AI in the preparation of your assessed work.
The UVA Faculty AI Guides are a group of UVA faculty who are helping their colleagues explore the role of generative AI in their teaching. The 2024-2025 Guides have taken a variety of thoughtful approaches to AI in their own courses, as seen here through a selection of syllabus statements.
The UVA Faculty AI Guides not only assist colleagues in thinking about the role of generative AI in their teaching, they also take intentional approaches to AI in their own courses. Here are several examples of how AI Guides have communicated to their students about AI.
Lance Eaton’s collaborative Google Doc showcases a range of course policies related to AI tools. Use this document to get a sense of other instructors’ expectations and inspire your own course policy. You can also contribute!
This Google Doc is great because you can see a wide range of course policies all in one place.
This interactive decision-tree will guide you, step-by-step, through writing a syllabus statement based on your personal AI expectations.
If you want scaffolded support in creating your own AI syllabus statement, this is the tool for you. I love its full customizability—the tool provides concrete language that you can use, adapt, and revise as you go.
Generative artificial intelligence tools — software that creates new text, images, computer code, audio, video, and other content by following patterns learned from large datasets — burst into international attention in November 2022 when OpenAI made its generative text tool ChatGPT widely available to the public. The availability and capability of such tools continue to accelerate rapidly. Recognizing that individual faculty members will have different attitudes toward the use of such tools, the Office of the Dean of Seaver College has chosen to maximize faculty discretion on a course-by-course basis. The Dean’s Office strongly recommends that every course syllabus include an explicit statement regarding the use of generative AI tools in that course.
Accordingly, I’m here to help you construct a draft statement for your own syllabus. To be clear, I am not powered by generative AI. I’m just an interactive decision tree written in a conversational style to mimic a chatbot.
Want to recommend a resource to add to this collection? Send us an email.