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Faculty Guide to Generative AI in Higher Education

This guide discusses generative AI tools (GAITs), with a focus on the ethical use of these tools in academic work. Other major topics include: using GAITs for teaching and learning, incorporating GAITs into graded assignments, and citation guidelines.

One researcher commented on Meta's Galatica tool (which was taken offline after three days of demo and user feedback), saying, “You should never keep the output verbatim or trust it. Basically, treat it like an advanced Google search of (sketchy) secondary sources!” (Cranmer, 2022, as cited in Heaven, 2022). 

Students' digital and information literacy skills now need to expand to include AI literacy. Explore this topic with your students by designing assignments like:

  • Determining if writing was human-produced or machine-produced;
  • Discussing how chatbots work and what intelligence means for humans and machines;
  • Brainstorming how chatbots can be used in students' future professions, noting limitations and ethical considerations;
  • Examining the dataset used to train a particular AI tool (e.g., Who created it? How was it collected? If personal data was used, did individuals give consent? Is the data representative of the population using the tool? What biases may be present?);
  • Fact checking outputs by chatbots—trace claims to original source materials or find sources to refute claims;
  • Exploring the limitations of chatbots in your discipline;
  • Discussing how to resist automation bias like that found in Robinette et al.'s (2016) “Overtrust of Robots in Emergency Evacuation Scenarios” research (Toon, 2016). 

Ideas inspired by Long & Magerko (2020).

Trust (2022) lists ways to engage students in critiquing and improving ChatGPT responses.

  • Pre-service teachers might critique how a ChatGPT lesson plan integrates technologies using the Triple E Rubric or examine whether it features learning activities that support diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion. (This will help future teachers learn to critique TPT resources! )

  • Computer science students might identify potential ways to revise ChatGPT generated code to reduce errors and improve output.

  • Middle school students might critically review the feedback ChatGPT provides on their writing and determine what is most helpful to their own learning. 

  • High school and college students could analyze, provide feedback on, and even grade text produced by ChatGPT as a way to prepare for peer review of their classmates’ work. 

Watkins (2022) suggests designing an assignment where students:

  1. Identify a current issue in your field.
  2. Develop a rubric with specific criteria upon which to judge a chatbot's response.
  3. Individually write a question prompt for the chatbot.
  4. In groups, compare the responses by applying the rubric.

Engage students in critical thinking by asking them to revise chatbot outputs. If you are hesitant to ask students to sign up for a chatbot account (see our privacy and free labor discussion), generate a few responses yourself and post these in your LMS course.

You can structure your assignment so students will:

  • Use the Track Changes feature to mark up a chatbot output;
  • Reflect on the chatbot output by noting what important details are missing;
  • Research claims made in the chatbot output and add in appropriate citations;
  • Expand on a particular section or claim; or
  • Rewrite the output from the other side of the argument.

Ideas were inspired by Watkins (2022).

Chatbots can be a great tool at the beginning of projects. Students can ask a chatbot to:

  • Generate 10 ideas for a paper about a specific topic;
  • Create an outline for a paper;
  • Create an outline for an infographic;
  • Generate ideas for a podcast;
  • List blog post ideas.

After using the chatbot for brainstorming, students can then craft their final project.

 

Educators can assess students' prompts to a chatbot to assess their knowledge. For this kind of assignment, students could ask the chatbot an initial question, and then follow up with additional prompts to hone a more accurate or holistic response. 

Students can respond to the output and create a new but similar output by stating something like, "Great, but this time include..."

Students act as the experts and guide the chatbot to the best response.

Idea from Bruff (2023).

Ask ChatGPT to design a board game or invention related to the course content and then have students build a physical or digital model for the design/invention. (ChatGPT can’t build the inventions it comes up with.)

Idea from Trust (2023).

Trust (2022) suggests to use ChatGPT to analyze how the bot generates text for different audiences. For example:

  • Ask ChatGPT to explain a concept for a 5 year old, college student, and expert. Analyze the difference in the way ChatGPT uses language. 

Ofgang (2022) has a similar idea: use the chatbot to generate outputs to compare and analyze different genres or writing styles (e.g., Ernest Hemingway).

AI chatbots can enter into the role of a game simulator when given the right prompt as demonstrated by Bryan Alexander. Learners can practice critical thinking and decision making as they interact with the simulation. (Note the guardrails, biases, and limitations that Alexander points out in his blog post.)

Move away from the five-paragrah essay format. Chatbots can follow this format easily. Encourage your students' originality by moving away from this formulaic format.

Tip: If you want to stick with the five-paragraph essay, test out your prompt on an advanced chatbot like ChatGPT. Greene (2022) writes, "If it can come up with an essay that you would consider a good piece of work, then that prompt should be refined, reworked, or simply scrapped... if you have come up with an assignment that can be satisfactorily completed by computer software, why bother assigning it to a human being?"

Sticking with essays? Warner (2022) suggests focusing on process rather than product. Scaffolding learning and allowing students to explain their thinking and make learning visible along the way are strategies that may help you confirm student originality. Warner's philosophy aligns with that at Butler University: "I talk to the students, one-on-one about themselves, about their work. If we assume students want to learn - and I do - we should show our interest in their learning, rather than their performance."

In the short-term, you can have your students write essays in class and on paper. 

This isn't a good long-term solution for a few reasons:

  • For longer research papers, students will have access to chatbots outside of class.
  • Students may need to use online resources for their writing.
  • You won't be able to use the LMS feedback tools for annotation, rubric scoring, and grading.

Note: Some students may have accommodations to type their work rather than handwrite it. Make sure to follow student accommodations when assigning work. 

Idea from Ditch That Textbook

Using collaborative activities and discussions is one strategy to mitigate the use of chatbot responses in your class. While students may generate ideas from a chatbot, they will need to discuss with one another whether they want to use the chatbot responses, if they fit the prompt, and if they are factually accurate.

Activities to try include:

These strategies can work for online courses with a few tweaks. For discussions, ask students to post a recording rather than text. While students may generate a response using ChatGPT, creating their video will require more interaction with the content than copy-pasting a text response would.

Idea from Ditch That Textbook

Engage your students in meaning-making activities to demonstrate their learning.

Consider low-tech activities like:

Consider technology-infused activities like:

 

* Note that a chatbot can provide an outline for these activities.

Idea from Ditch That Textbook

Brain dumps are an ungraded recall strategy. The practice involves pausing a lecture and asking students to write everything they can recall about a specific topic. Read more at:

 

Idea from Ditch That Textbook

During or after writing, students explain their process or thinking. Students could:

  • Use Comments in Word or Google Docs;
  • Create a video explaining their change history on a Google Doc;
  • Use Track Changes to show their revisions.

Ideas were inspired by Watkins (2022).

Consider using planned or impromptu oral exams. You may consider including phrasing in your syllabus about conducting oral exams if you suspect plagiarism through the use of a chatbot.

Idea from Darren Hudson Hick (2022).

When selecting readings, consider sourcing more obscure texts for your students to read. Chatbots may have less information in their training data on obscure texts. As an example, the New York Times reports that, "Frederick Luis Aldama, the humanities chair at the University of Texas at Austin, said he planned to teach newer or more niche texts that ChatGPT might have less information about, such as William Shakespeare’s early sonnets instead of 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream'" (Huang, 2023). 

Contact your department's librarian for help sourcing new content.

(Note that ChatGPT is currently trained on data through 2021. Some educators suggest using newer writings and research, but this strategy isn't foolproof since the training models for chatbots are updated frequently.)

Coordinate times to take your class to conduct field observations; students can note their observations and write a reflection about their experience.

Idea from Kelley (2023)