Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools can be beneficial to students, faculty, and staff; however, there are ethical issues and limitations to be aware of.

Below are some resources on adapting your teaching to AI, and see bit.ly/teachchatgpt for a printable handout with strategies for adapting your teaching and saving time using AI.

General AI Resources

The most popular generative AI tools include OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Microsoft Copilot, but see also this Generative AI Product Tracker and FuturePedia for hundreds of other AI tools.

Which generative AI tool for your task? can help you select which AI tool to use.

If you do not make some changes to your teaching and/or course design, there is a risk that some students may use AI tools to cheat. Try submitting your assignments, discussion prompts, and test questions to an AI chat tool like ChatGPT to see how well it performs. Several studies are finding that ChatGPT can often complete academic tasks at the level of a graduate student. Below are some resources with strategies for adapting your teaching to be either more AI-resistant or AI-embracing.

• See the 5 strategies in this handout, as well as some do’s and don’ts for using AI: Adapting Your Teaching to Generative AI Tools
• Consider adopting authentic learning and alternative assessments which are more like real-world activities. Here is a guide to alternative assessment and a powerpoint with some ideas for AI-enabled authentic assessments.
• Have your students create openly-licensed videos or text. See examples at the Open Pedagogy Notebook and OER-Enabled Pedagogy sites. Try peer assessment.
• How Do I (Re)design Assignments and Assessments in an AI-Impacted World?
  
• How Do I Consider the Impact of AI Tools in My Courses?
  

AI tools can help instructors with designing their courses and saving time on administrative tasks.  Below are also some resources on integrating AI into your teaching.

• TeacherServer – dozens of free AI tools for instructors. Requires registering for a free account.

• Learn with AI from U. Maine has several resources and strategies for adapting to AI in education

• AI Prompting Guide for Online Course Design
• Exploring AI Pedagogy – a community collection from MLA
• Ethan Mollick has a prompt library, sample student exercises, and other resources including a book on AI and a recent article on new AI learning opportunities
• Philippa Hardman has articles on using AI to aid instructional design
• Free ebooks
  • Generative Artificial Intelligence: Practical Uses in Education 
  • Teaching and Generative AI: Pedagogical Possibilities and Productive Tensions

Be sure to include an AI policy statement in your syllabus so that students are clear on whether or how AI is allowed or not allowed. It is recommended that you discuss the reasoning behind your policy with students, too.

• Here also is a list of some sample AI course policies from other schools and see below for a couple of sample ones for a composition course
• See also this AI Policy Flowchart and this AI Continuum from “all AI” to “all human” coursework

If you suspect a student has used AI to cheat on an activity, below are some resources which may be helpful.

• What to do when you detect or suspect AI-Generated Text
• Be aware AI detectors (such as TurnItIn) have low accuracy rates, which can lead to false accusations. On average 1 out of 140 students will be falsely accused of cheating by these tools, according to a recent study. You shouldn’t use an AI detector as the sole source of evidence for an academic integrity violation.
• Studies have found that instructors cannot intuitively distinguish AI-generated text from student-generated text. This makes sense because these AI tools are trained until they generate text that is indistinguishable from human-generated text, as determined by human raters. There are no shortcut heuristics to determine whether text is AI-generated, such as lack of contractions, overuse of certain words, etc.

AI literacy training can help reduce student overuse of AI as well as help students learn how to use these tools more productively and ethically.

• AI in Education – sample course created by and for students

• A (Working) Framework for AI Literacy – article about an AI Literacy course in Canvas Commons

• AI Curriculum Hub is a spreadsheet listing many more AI literacy curricula

• Towards AI Literacy: 101+ Creative and Critical Practices, Perspectives and Purposes

• AI Literacy Day – March 25

Do’s and Don’ts When Using ChatGPT & Similar Tools

• Do try ChatGPT and similar tools yourself – Submit some of your own assignments or questions to see the responses generated. Check for any errors and false information.
• Don’t use AI detectors – They have low accuracy rates, are not reliable, are very easy to beat, and may collect and use student work and data. Don’t use it as a sole source of evidence.
• Do consider adding an AI policy to your syllabus – See these sample course policies & flowchart.
• Do consider making your assessments more authentic, open, collaborative – Try authentic assessment, open pedagogy, peer assessment, or video discussions. See also AI-powered education.
• Don’t be scammed – In many cases, it’s not really necessary to pay for these AI tools. Don’t reveal personal or financial information when using these tools.
• Do see if these tools might assist you in your teaching – They might save you time & assist with generating assessments, lesson plans, and even grading, but use ethically.

If you are using ChatGPT or similar tools in your courses:

• Do explain to students why you are using AI tool – Think how you will introduce ChatGPT. What knowledge & skills will they gain? Consider building students’ AI literacy, addressing misconceptions.
• Do see guides for more effectively using AI in teaching – Such as Ideas for Using ChatGPT in Education, Unlocking the Power of Generative AI for Higher Education, & UNESCO AI Quick Start Guide.
• Do consider having your students ask or discuss questions before or after using AI – The same goes with videos & readings. You and your students could annotate and revise ChatGPT’s responses, for example.
• Don’t require students to use AI tools, or else provide alternatives – Provide alternative options for students, or give them the option of submitting prompts to you to submit to AI tools.
• Don’t depend on these tools working in a live class – Sometimes the servers are overloaded. If your entire class connects to an AI tool at the same time, they may be blocked.
• Do learn how to write better prompts – See these sample teaching prompts or a teacher guide or this prompt engineering guide. There are also tips for altering ChatGPT’s default writing style.
• Do learn about other AI tools beyond ChatGPT – See FuturePedia for over 5000!
• Do be on the lookout for more open and ethical alternatives – Open source AI models are available. Create free HuggingChat Assistants. Run AI locally w/LMStudio, GPT4All, or Ollama.
• Do consider issues with these tools generating false, biased, or harmful content – Check out the AI Incident Database.

You might refer your students to an AI chatbot or custom AI tool to assist them in your course but beware of issues such as hallucinations (false information), bias, cost, privacy, and unethical usage. Consider having students complete an AI literacy module or lesson first.

• AI Tutor Pro is one example free educational chatbot, created by the nonprofit Contact North organization in Canada. Students select the topic area they want to learn and go from there.

• Google’s NotebookLM lets you upload course materials and ask questions about them, generate quizzes or whatever based on them, or even generate a podcast
• AI MicroApps by John Swope, including a debate partner, rubric generator, learning objectives builder & mapper, alt text generator

• ASU AI Labs includes apps for generating alt text, rubrics, learning objectives, questions

• And here are a couple of experiments with a free and open source AI platform (HuggingChat) for creating AI assistants:

  • College Teaching Coach – tips for teaching
  • College Success Bot – uses the College Success OpenStax textbook as a resource

• Privacy – be cautious about what you or your students share with AI tools, as the information may be used for AI training or shared with data brokers and advertisers

  • Privacy in an AI Era: How Do We Protect Our Personal Information?

  • Generative AI’s privacy problem

  • AI Tools and Student Data Privacy

• Hallucinations – AI tools will sometimes make up false information, such as fake references

  • When AI Gets It Wrong: Addressing AI Hallucinations and Bias
  • AI Incident Database

• Bias – AI tools can give biased answers. Guard rails can also sometimes be circumvented to have AI generate harmful content.

  • Helping students understand the biases in generative AI

  • Generative AI: UNESCO study reveals alarming evidence of regressive gender stereotypes

• Cost & Access – some AI tools charge for access to premium features

  • Experts say AI may widen the digital divide in education. Here’s why.

  • AI literacy and the new Digital Divide – A Global Call for Action

• Environmental – AI tools often use significant energy and water

  • Fixing AI’s energy crisis

  • AI’s Energy Demands Are Out of Control

Accessibility

Videos need accurate captions or transcripts, including correct punctuation and spelling. Auto-generated captions typically are not accurate enough. Images need accurate descriptions (alt text), including complex images, diagrams, and graphs. Luckily, AI tools can now help do this work for us.

• Image Accessibility Generator – from ASU generates a description of an image you upload

  • See also John Swope’s Alt Text Generator – both use the same underlying OpenAI LLM and were built with Streamlit

  • Alt Text Generator is a ChatGPT bot created by CITT, based on the ASU one

  • and see this guide on How to Write Alt Text

• Generating Captions or Transcripts
  • Youtube-dlg can download mp4 video files, which can then be loaded by Whisper to generate a more accurate transcript or captions. See WhisperDesktop or MacWhisper.
  • You can also ask ChatGPT/Gemini/etc. to correct a transcript with a prompt like: without changing any of the words, fix the punctuation and spelling of this transcript:

• Other Accessibility and AI Resources