As Gen AI (GAI) tools proliferated across the globe during the last few semesters, did you find yourself panicked, excited, or feeling a bit of both? Were you overwhelmed by the implications for academic integrity or overcome by a sense of wonder at the boundless potential to innovate our teaching, learning, and research? However you reacted, you are not alone. Countless faculty are navigating this new era of educational transformation together and likely share many of your questions and concerns. So what have you learned and how are you preparing for the semesters ahead?

Many institutions are holding off on establishing blanket Gen AI use policies because so much about GAI differs from course to course and discipline to discipline. In the meantime, faculty have an opportunity to shape the way GAI is used in our teaching, in our research, in our labs, in our curriculum design, and in the ways we intentionally prepare our students for the future. Cornell’s Center for Teaching Innovation offers useful guidance on how to approach GAI in individual courses, and I’m going to briefly build on some of those recommendations below.

Recommendation 1: Talk to your students about GAI throughout the semester and have a plan for notifying your students about how they can or cannot use AI in assignments for your courses. Cornell’s resources use the distinctions “prohibit, allow with attribution, or encourage” to indicate to students how GAI tools can be used with particular assignments. As you’re designing your own assignments, especially your major assignments for the semesters ahead, consider alerting students to your GAI expectations on the first day of class, in the syllabus, AND on each assignment.

The table above offers three broad categories of GAI Use and explains to students what each category means for the assignments they’re completing. Also, be explicit about the names of AI tools or functions you prohibit or allow. Grammarly’s AI functions can generate outlines, assist with research or brainstorming, or write complete, detailed drafts for students, in addition to the standard grammar and spelling suggestions. You may wish to prohibit some functions, but allow others.

If you take the same approach to all course assignments, you can apply the assignment language above to describe your course as a whole. It is still a good reinforcement to include the assignment-specific GAI guidance in your instructions.

Generative Artificial Intelligence Course Use Statements

  • Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) Use Prohibited: This course is meant to help you develop and use foundational knowledge and skills. You will need to demonstrate your ability to apply your understanding of this content without the use of AI, including tools like Grammarly, ChatGPT, Bing, Gemini, and similar tools. 
  • Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) Use Allowed with Attribution: This course invites you to use GAI as a resource, but you’ll need to include notes and citations to indicate where in the assignment you used GAI-generated content. There may be additional parts of the assignment where I ask you to analyze the GAI content or to indicate the process you used to check the information for accuracy and truthfulness. 
  • ​Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) Use Encouraged with Attribution: This course uses GAI as a part of the learning process. You are invited to use your preferred GAI tools to push further into your explorations, take your thinking in a new direction, solve complex equations or problems,  generate case studies, or other uses. Use citations in our course citation style to indicate where in the assignment you used GAI as a thought partner.

What other categories might you add to the table above to offer your students discipline and course-specific guidance? Does your area of expertise have more nuanced ways that students can collaborate with GAI and how will you bring your students into that conversation? If your course is already using GAI technologies, how will you magnify those uses for your students?

Recommendation 2: Rely on your expertise and conversations with students about their work to identify GAI-enabled plagiarism. Learn about how tools like Grammarly and TurnItIn evaluate student submissions and can create potential issues with false positives and how those evaluations disproportionately impact students from underrepresented groups. Grammarly and TurnItIn have come under scrutiny and recommend that faculty ultimately should determine whether student-submitted work is original. (Check out Kentucky University’s Center for Teaching Excellence article on Using Caution with AI Detectors).

It is important to remember that your own disciplinary expertise and academic experience is the most powerful plagiarism detector, even in an AI-enabled world. Academic integrity conversations and even disciplinary hearings do not require documented sources for you to take appropriate action within a course. Ironically, it is only our past reliance on AI-based plagiarism detection software that makes us expect to find a perfect match.

To prepare for grading, you may input your assignment prompt or test question into a Google AI search or use Microsoft Copilot Protected Mode (sign in with your USC Upstate email username and password). If students provide responses using the common themes and phrases from AI, you may need to have a follow-up conversation, such as the scripted conversations from the UNC Charlotte Division of Student Affairs.

Recommendation 3: Learn about, join, and extend the conversation about Gen AI. If you aren’t quite sure what all the Gen AI hype is about or how faculty are approaching GAI, explore some of the resources below. Also, check out the Spring 2024 University of South Carolina Upstate Alumni and Friends Magazine for some exciting faculty highlights to see how Gen AI is already well-established in some programs across campus. Reach out to highlighted faculty like Logan Camp-Spivey, Celena Kusch, Kristi Miller, or Wei Zhong to hear about their adoption process and see what might work for you.

In the materials listed below, resource number 6, “Discipline-specific Generative AI Teaching and Learning Resources” from the University of Delaware offers several concise, interactive pages of articles and materials relevant to majors here at USC Upstate, including nursing, teacher ed, math, languages, composition and English, computer science, math, and history to name a few. Additionally, Barnard College’s interactive Gen AI and the College Classroom page should be a resource at the top of everyone’s list.

  1. “AI and Academia: The End of the Essay?” recording from a webinar hosted by Maple League Universities on January 31, 2023.
  2. “AI FUTURES: An Interdisciplinary Conversation on Large Language Models and the Future of Human Writing” hosted by Rutgers’ Critical AI on February 16, 2023.
  3. “ChatGPT – The Future of the Classroom Webinar,” recording of a webinar hosted by Vanderbilt University on May 17, 2023.
  4. “What AI Means for Teaching” recording from a webinar hosted by the Modern Language Association on July 26, 2023. Please note: you will need to enter your name and email to view the webinar.
  5. “AI for Learning, Teaching, and Writing” recording from a webinar hosted by American Chemical Society on August 13, 2023. Please note: only available to ACS members.
  6. “Discipline-specific Generative AI Teaching and Learning Resources” developed by University of Delaware Center for Teaching & Assessment of Learning.

Recommendation 4: Share your thinking/research/practice with the rest of us! If you’re looking for more opportunities to join the conversation and to share your own work, attend USC Upstate’s Power and Implications of the AI Revolution: The Emerging Role of Individuals, Organizations, and Society Conference and register through the conference website. The conference will be held virtually Friday, January 31st from 9:00AM-3:30PM. Topics include implications of AI in the workforce and the shape of work in the future; Ethical issues in AI policy, development, and applications; and Emerging roles of AI in education and knowledge creation. See you there!