For Teachers
Hopefully, as a teacher, and perhaps also as a course coordinator, you are part of a context where you can continuously discuss opportunities and challenges with colleagues, share your experiences with them, and learn from theirs. This is especially important when technological development is as rapid as it is with generative AI, while our practices and understanding of the consequences AI can or needs to have for our teaching do not develop as quickly.
Below are some suggestions for what you may need to do to manage the situation and develop both your and your students’ AI literacy. If there are several teachers on the same course or module, it is beneficial to do as much of this together as possible.
Step 1: Identify opportunities and risks in the courses you teach
To assess what generative AI can mean for your teaching, you need to know a bit about how generative AI works and the general opportunities and risks that exist. Then, from your subject perspective, the formal course objectives, and your pedagogical ideas, you can more clearly see what needs to be changed for generative AI to play a positive role in students’ learning, and to prevent students from using generative AI in other contexts.
You can, for example:
- Read briefly about how generative AI works
- Review a list of pros and cons of AI in education
- Read about how AI can be used in teaching and assessment
- Deepen your knowledge with online courses, etc.
- And of course, test some tools yourself, primarily in Copilot, which teachers and students at UU have access to
While you are finding a reasonable approach, it is good to early on try to formulate how you will justify the use or non-use of generative AI - students will surely ask about it.
This does not have to be a simple process - but talk to your colleagues and look out for seminars and workshops that can be helpful.
Step 2: Revise or create new course material
You will likely need to work on three things:
- Review how you assess the course! If you need to adjust the form of examinations to ensure you still have a good basis for your assessment, try to find a form that not only is defensive but, if possible, improves the assessment! You can, for example, read more about preventing cheating and making cheating more difficult. Remember that changes in the form of assessment may require changes in the course syllabus - and it can take time to get through!
- Think through other parts of the course, which are not assessed by formal examinations, and what role - if any - you want generative AI to play there. Often, many students will surely use some AI tool, and when examination is not involved, it does not have to be a problem or something that always needs to be reported. However, as a teacher, you may want to highlight how AI is used, and in the instructions for certain tasks explicitly assign students to use AI, and then discuss interesting questions about this during the course. Some suggestions for such questions can be found on the page about practicing critical AI use.
- Formulate a text that as clearly and precisely as possible states what is allowed and not allowed use of generative AI in the course and its various parts. If there are central guidelines, you can refer to them, but each course always needs a document that applies specifically to your course and is addressed to your students! In this document, you can also include your justifications for any limitations you specify. You can start from these examples of local regulations for courses.
Step 3: Communicate with students about AI use
The document you have prepared should be published in Studium, preferably at the same time as the rest of the course page is published. Show where it is and go through it orally at the introduction to the course or module, and refer back to it during the course. Make it clear that the regulations are those that apply to your course, even if other courses the students have taken have made different decisions.
Set aside time to discuss the content of the document (and then you should have your justifications ready) and be prepared to be influenced by students’ good arguments! If there are central guidelines that students need to know, you should show them as well. Emphasize to students that it is their responsibility to always contact the course coordinator directly if they are at all unsure about how the regulations should be interpreted!
Make room to problematize and deepen AI use during the course. Through your way of formulating, handling, and discussing generative AI with students, you contribute to shaping their AI literacy.
And above all: do not be overwhelmed by AI so that its opportunities and risks overshadow the reason why both you and the students are there! Together with you, students delve into knowledge areas, theories, methodological questions, and problems where generative AI is a tool - sometimes necessary, sometimes just peripheral or unnecessary - among others. It does not replace the development of the critically grounded, independent understanding of the world that one seeks at a university - and which is not only expressed in front of a screen, if anyone thought so.