Generative AI Resources

Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) emerged in December of 2022, and since then, our faculty, staff, and lecturers have posed numerous questions and started engaging in thoughtful conversations about how to approach and use Gen AI in an academic context. 

EMU’s approach to Gen AI allows professors and lecturers significant latitude in setting classroom policies for its use. This webpage, which will be continually updated, provides some general information about Gen AI, along with guidance, from a teaching and learning perspective, for developing Gen AI class policies and for teaching and developing assignments in a Gen AI world. 

Our hope with this webpage is to offer support to faculty and lecturers as they navigate this new landscape. We also hope that we can all work and learn together, alongside one another and our students. Gen AI will play a significant role in all of our futures; it already is creating a big footprint, not only in higher education, but also in many professions. Our students will want and need an understanding of and experience with Gen AI to be prepared for their careers and competitive for future jobs.

In addition to this webpage, we also have had several EMU instructors write up blog posts on their experiences using AI in and out of the classroom. To read the blog posts, please visit our Teaching Blog.

• Using and Becoming Familiar with Gen AI – And Your Own Stance with Gen AI Expand dropdown

  We recommend and encourage you to spend some time exploring available Gen AI programs, such as Chatgpt. Try it out yourself. Understand the lived experience of using it the way your students might, and see for yourself what these tools can do, what they cannot do, and how their capabilities and limitations might affect how you approach and use them in your classes.  

  In particular, when you use Gen AI, what do you notice? What might it help you and/or your students with? What does it seem to be good at and not so good at? For instance, one persistent limitation is that Gen AI is not good at generating correct citations. In some cases, it even makes them up! Knowing this and experiencing it yourself can help you more effectively raise and explore such issues and shortcomings with your students. So far, ChatGPT also isn’t very good at writing in a voice that seems natural or authentic. In other words, its outputs often are formulaic and stitled.

• Things to Consider and Know About Gen AI in Teachinng Expand dropdown

  The arrival of such robust Gen AI programs also offers all of us as educators an opportunity to reflect on who we are and want to be as educators, in addition to what we want our students to learn and be able to do as a result of taking our classes. Like many other new technologies, Gen AI offers us the opportunity to think about how we teach and what we might ask students to do in your classes.  We encourage you to seize and embrace this opportunity, but to do so intentionally and thoughtfully.

  For example, what do you hope your students gain from the assignments for your classes? What do you hope to gain from those assignments? Your responses to these questions will help you break down the fourth wall and share with your students why they are doing the assignments you give them, and what you hope they will learn from them. Thinking metacognitively about this may even help you generate assignments that will work more effectively in achieving your teaching and learning goals. Think of Gen AI as a potential resource and as an opportunity to reconsider your approaches to your classes rather than as a threat to what you’re trying to do. We hope the resources and suggestions we provide will be of use to you as you do this. We believe that, used well, Gen AI will become an important tool for helping our students learn.

  By way of some suggestions, we encourage you to

  • Find ways to use and integrate Gen AI in the assignments you give. Recent posts in the Faculty Development Center’s Teaching Blog offer examples of how to do this from a variety of disciplines. 
  • Think about ways Gen AI can help your students with some of the tasks they will perform in your classes. Think of ways it might aid and support both your teaching and your students’ learning.  
  • Set guidelines, rather than rules, and invite students to use Gen AI to aid and support their learning. 

  Since these technologies will be part of students’ personal and professional lives, giving students the opportunity to work with them now will make them more competitive for jobs and professional opportunities down the road. We’re already reading about this in professional literature, and it will only continue to become more important. Students will look to us, as disciplinary experts, to familiarize them with different ways to use Gen AI, to teach them how to acknowledge and cite it, and to provide guidance on how to incorporate its materials into their academic and professional work.

  And remember, while Generative AI does many amazing things, it does not think critically, it does not fact check, and it is not always accurate. Its output also is often formulaic, and it makes mistakes in reasoning and analysis. Students need to be made aware of this (if they are not already).

• Setting Course Policies Expand dropdown

  At this stage, few of us fully understand this new technology. We are just beginning to understand what it can do, what its limitations are, and how we can use it most effectively in our teaching – and even in our research. As you work toward setting your own course policies and determining the guidance you might give to students, we urge you to take time to use and learni about Gen AI. We believe learning both with and alongside your students will cultivate trust and respect, which will be essential as we move forward with these technologies.

  Here is some general guidance to help you develop your course policies on Gen AI:

  1. List your Gen AI policies on your syllabus and talk about them in class – perhaps even several times throughout the semester. Be sure to communicate your policies in ways that are clear and specific. Students want and need, and have the right, to know your expectations.  
  2. Know that you do not need to start from scratch or reinvent the wheel - the University of Minnesota, for example, offers three possible policies to play with (and adapt) for your own use. And this website offers numerous additional options. Youry colleagues may also have good ideas to share. Having these conversations at the program and departmental level could be very generative. 
  3. Be flexible in developing and setting your policies. Most of us have been considering the ramifications of this new technology for less than a year. As our understanding and experiences continue to expand, our policies should certainly change as well. While mid-course corrections can be difficult, they may be warranted. The rapidly changing world of Gen AI certainly means we should be revisiting our policies, at a minimum, every semester.

  So what should your policy be? This is ultimately your call, but if you ask us (and, by visiting this webpage, it seems you are!), here are some things we would – and would not – recommend:

  1. First, we do not recommend banning the use of Gen AI in class. Like the internet 30 years ago, Gen AI is poised to become part of our students’ work lives and careers. Understanding how it works and how to use it for maximum benefit is going to be an important skill our students will need to bring to the table when they apply for jobs. What better way to begin learning these skills than by using Gen AI, with appropriate guardrails, in our classes?
  2. We encourage caution in using commercially available detection software or other tools to catch students cheating using Gen AI. These programs and tools produce inconsistent and often unreliable results. They rely on probabilities, and they also run the risk of being biased. Research has shown that plagiarism detection software, in general, is disproportionally biased against students from underrepresented and marginalized groups. In our judgment, the risks and shortcomings in using this software far outweigh the rewards.
  3. Instead, set examples for your students of transparency, humility (not many of us can claim to be an expert in generative AI), and a willingness to learn, and to work with your students as they learn these technologies.
  4. We also recommend being purposeful and thinking about what you are asking of your students and why. How do your assignments support your learning outcomes?
  5. Finally, consider scaffolding your assignments. This means asking students to carry out assignments in multiple steps, providing feedback throughout the process, and encouraging and supporting originality. Taking these basic steps will reduce the likelihood of students using Generative AI to produce their assignments.

  You will undoubtedly do the best job you can to create and articulate your course policies relating to Generative AI. Again, we encourage you to keep an open mind and be flexible as we all continue to learn and gain more experience with these technologies. We also encourage you to stress integrity but to do so in ways that support rather than penalize students, that are sensitive to the assumptions and the biases we all may bring to the evaluation of student work, and that promote collaboration between instructors and students as a means to enhance student learning.

• Other Resources Expand dropdown

  University of Minnesota ChatGPT Syllabus Statements

  Syllabi Policies for AI Generative Tools - Running Document

  APA Guidance on Citing ChatGPT

  Quick Start Guide to AI and Writing

  How to Create Compelling Writing Assignments in a ChatGPT Age

  MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI Working Paper: Overview of the Issues, Statement of Principles, and Recommendations

  4 Steps to Helping You Plan for ChatGPT in Your Classroom

  Citation Conventions for GenAI and Chatbots

  Using Generative AI or Chatbots in the Writing Process