Teaching with AI Guide

As generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies become increasingly accessible and advanced, they present both significant challenges and opportunities for higher education institutions and educators. At its core, AI in higher education raises fundamental questions about how we conceptualize teaching and learning. How might AI augment our instructional practices, fostering personalized learning experiences tailored to individual student needs? What are the ethical implications of using AI in educational contexts? How can we ensure AI literacy and help students navigate the AI-infused world?

Key Practices

Getting Started

  • Explore AI Tools First: Sign up and interact with AI tools to gain familiarity with their capabilities and limitations. 
  • Identify Possible Uses: Consider specific areas where an AI tool could provide value. What do these tools do particularly well? Where do these tools fall short or fail? 
  • Set Appropriate Expectations:  Manage expectations by clearly communicating that AI is a powerful aid, not a replacement for human expertise.
  • Emphasize AI Literacy: Teach students about AI writing capabilities and limitations so they understand ethical boundaries.
  • Practice Good Data Stewardship: Be mindful of the data you input into any AI tool and avoid inputting personal information about yourself or your students. In some cases inputs are used to train models and your original work may be retained by the vendor. You may be able to limit the data used to train the model (see guide for ChatGPT).

Develop an AI Policy

  • Co-create an AI Policy with Students: Openly discuss guidelines and get student input on acceptable AI tool use for assignments. 
  • Be Explicit about Permitted Use: Specify if/when students can use AI tools, what tools are allowed, and how to properly cite AI assistance. Update codes of conduct to clearly indicate what constitutes unacceptable AI use versus productive AI-human collaboration. See UMN’s AI policy syllabus statements for more information about adding a statement to your syllabus. 
  • Lead with Trust, but Set Limits: Have an honest discussion about motivations and learning goals, and be clear that policy violations constitute academic dishonesty. Enhance students’ AI literacy by discussing AI writing capabilities and limitations related to ethical boundaries.

Engage Students

  • Build Critical AI Literacy: Have students analyze the performance of AI tools based on their inputs and the effectiveness, bias, or relevance of the outputs; consider together how the tools can and should be used including any limitations.
  • Generate Activities: Consider using AI to generate interactive narratives, simulations, examples, or games based on course concepts. These immersive experiences capture student interest and reinforce learning in engaging ways.
  • AI Tutoring:  Students can use AI to develop quizzes over course content, test their understanding of larger themes, and use the feedback to create personalized study plans based on their assessments.
  • Summarize: AI can summarize trends in a discussion board, video, or readings to help students identify common questions and look for new ways to consider the content.

Instructor Applications 

  • Content Generation: AI can assist in generating draft instructional materials such as lesson plans, discussion prompts, worksheets, quizzes, class summaries, and other content tailored to a specific audience or skill level. 
  • Explanations and Examples:  Instructors can ask AI to develop a range of explanations, metaphors, or illustrations of complex material. Providing multiple examples to illustrate a topic can help connect with different types of learners. Students too can be asked to evaluate the outputs and refine or reimagine the examples. 
  • Analysis: Pair Canvas analytic information with AI to analyze course participation, discussions, engagement, and other data to find trends in and among classes. 
  • Administrative Tasks: AI could be used to develop a course schedule with dates for your upcoming class or create drafts of routine course announcements. 
  • Task Management: AI tools can break down large tasks into small to-do items, create a schedule to scaffold large course projects, provide estimates of how long a student might need to read or write a set number of pages, or any other project management tasks needed to organize your course. 

Career Preparation 

As AI becomes more prevalent across industries, ensuring students have a baseline understanding of the technology's capabilities, limitations, and ethical implications will be crucial.

  • Career Exploration with AI: AI tools can assist students in exploring potential career paths by providing information on different professions, average salaries, job outlooks, required qualifications, and education levels. They can even help students identify careers well-suited to their interests and skills. 
  • AI-Powered Skills Assessments: AI platforms can evaluate a student's work across various assignments to provide insights into their proficiency levels in critical skills like analysis, writing, math, etc.
  • Job Application Support: AI can be used to brainstorm ways to present job or school experience on resumes and cover letters based on the specific job ad input. 
  • AI Interview Preparation: AI assistants can be used to conduct mock interviews, provide feedback on strengths and weaknesses, and even analyze aspects like tone and body language from recorded practice sessions.

 

AI Detectors 

As AI technology evolves rapidly, detecting the use of AI can be increasingly tricky. Though using an AI detector may deter some academic dishonesty and raise student’s awareness of the limits of AI and the need for original work, these tools are not foolproof. Current detection methods can produce false positives/negatives, particularly for generated content that has been substantially revised. Further, there can be privacy concerns when submitting student work to external tools without fully understanding their data and privacy policies. 

Rather than implementing AI detection tools punitively, the better approach is to have an open discussion with students about appropriate AI use from the start:

  • Focus on Process over Product: Consider how a project evolves from ideation to final product. Evaluate the research, reasoning, and revision process demonstrated by students. Ask students to include any AI prompts and outputs with their projects. 
  • Use Checkers Judiciously: If using AI detection tools, do so transparently. AI detection tools can be one component of a holistic assessment but should be used cautiously when considering punitive consequences given their current limitations. 
  • Focus on Student Understanding of Ethics: Emphasize developing AI literacy and critical analysis skills, rather than engaging in an endless cat-and-mouse game of trying to outsmart AI checkers. Frame AI as a powerful tool that has limits for proper use. 

Resources

Training And Workshops

Our LX Team has consultation appointment slots every week the university is open. Sign up at z.umn.edu/lx-calendar for an appointment or contact [email protected].