Elevate AI I - Situating AI with Class Policies
On November 30, 2023, Marisa Petrich and Chris Lott facilitated a session on situating AI in the classroom through policies and other student guidance.
While policies and guidance alone are insufficient, regardless of one's general approach toward integrating (or not!) AI, they are important and necessary.
The session was not recorded, but the materials and resources below are rich and useful on their own!
META
Primary Points
It’s wise to have written policies.
Policies are not written in stone (aka living documents)
Policies should be personalized, customized and clear.
Policies are significantly more effective as a foundation for discussion and, if appropriate, integration.
There are many excellent resources to help you on your way.
What About AI Detection?
It doesn’t work and is unlikely to anytime soon.
What We Talk About When We Talk About AI
Artificial, Not Intelligent
Dr. Emily Bender (UW): stochastic parrots
Still, sometimes uncannily effective and improving rapidly
Recent/current experiences? If instructors include writing assignments, it’s probable they have students using AI even if they haven’t identified those uses!
Considerations for crafting policies and discussions
Policy is not an endpoint, but a foundation for discussion and integration.
Principles
Policy should be:
Personalized, to increase attention from students and make it more meaningful as an ongoing way of thinking about learning,
Customized, to suit a particular instructor’s approach and a course’s activities, even if the approach is resistance, and
Clear, to ensure students understand what is expected of them in a particular course – remember that there are numerous ways to use AI or not, so we can’t make assumptions that students automatically know what’s appropriate.
Preparation
Are you prepared? Have you:
Familiarized yourself with the basics of what these systems are and what they do?
Tried out a few of the most common AI systems, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Bard (for text generation), Dall-E and Midjourney (for image generation), etc.?
Discussed with peers, mentors, and colleagues?
Become familiar with institutional policy?
Considerations
Your overall approach to AI: Are you generally favoring prohibition, resistance, permission, acknowledged use, free use, other?
Rules: It’s important to increase students’ awareness of rules and policy that apply to the use of AI, even if they are indirect/tangential. Traditional policies about plagiarism, for example, are an imperfect fit.
Education: Helping students understand why you have the rules and policies you have, and the limitations and benefits of the systems, is critical in helping them make their own choices.
Guidance: Student experience with AI varies drastically; it is unwise to assume any particular level of experience with, and willingness to use, AI. Considering your AI as you would other technologies, you may need to invoke specific systems, link to help documents and resources, integrate specific applications into your assignments, etc.
Promoting information literacy: AI is swiftly becoming a foundational part of the information and media landscape. At the very least, this means it shouldn’t be ignored. Use of AI needs to be contextualized as part of students' metacognitive processes: idea generation, exploration, information gathering, critical thinking, assessment, application, synthesis, and ethics.
Citation: If AI systems may be used, making students as comfortable as possible citing them will help dissuade students from silently incorporating AI text.
Time and location: Where do you share written policy and guidance? Where do you repeat and expand on those in closer proximity to specific activities and assignments? How, where, and when do you have those vital discussions about AI and its use? Where do you provide opportunities for reflection?
Policy Examples and Resources
Keeping all of the above in mind, you will be prepared to make the best and most efficient use of examples and resources for crafting your own AI-related policy, guidance, and discussions.
UWT AI Community of Practice: Policies & Assignments
UWT Teaching Tip: AI Classroom Policies
Collaborative: Syllabi Policies for AI Generative Tools
Other Resources
A few resources that go beyond classroom policy.
Note: we will use some of these in our followup ELEVATE session, focused on situating and integrating AI into your teaching and learning practices, and featuring AI Community of Practice participants’ incredible work!