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Generative AI & Your Teaching

20Mar’24

Resources

The evolution of generative artificial intelligence, or AI, raises questions about how we ask students to think, what skills they will need, and which assignments and course policies can best support your teaching.

On this page:

In addition to the resources provided here, CETLI hosts a number of events, including faculty discussions and seminars, to help instructors consider practices for AI use in their classroom. To see CETLI's upcoming workshops, visit the CETLI events page.

CETLI staff are also available for individual consultations for instructors and can host a workshop for your program or department to facilitate conversations about this technology. Contact CETLI to learn more. 

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What is Generative AI?

Generative AI creates text, images, computer code, and more in response to user prompts. These tools can adapt their responses based on user feedback in a conversational style. AI can enhance teaching and learning through its capacity to analyze and quickly respond to large amounts of data. However, AI has limitations, such as producing inaccurate or biased responses. Each user’s human judgment plays a large role in their ability to use generative AI effectively.

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Determining Where (or if) AI Fits Into Your Teaching

You may be eager to incorporate AI into your teaching as a way to help students gain knowledge, practice skills, or develop proficiency related to working with AI. Alternatively, you may find that it gets in the way of what you want your students to learn. Whatever you choose, be sure to design assignments and communicate your policies to students according to the ways you expect students to use or not use AI. This decision is dependent on your course goals and is worth reexamining regularly as a part of your teaching practice. To guide your decisions, consider:

  • What do I want my students to learn? Reflect on your primary course goals, the most vital takeaways from the course, and the types of thinking students need to do to accomplish them. These goals should guide your choices surrounding AI use in your course.
  • What type of work is essential to achieving the learning goals? For example, the idea-generation phase of a project may sometimes be more critical than the final written product, while at other times, crafting polished academic or discipline-specific writing is fundamental. Design your assignments to emphasize vital knowledge and skill development.
  • How might AI support or detract from students’ engagement in your course? AI has countless applications, such as serving as a dialogue partner to engage with course material, but certain uses may impede vital community-building and human interaction. Develop your AI policy around the knowledge and skills students should build without AI assistance.

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Penn AI Guidance and Policies

Generative AI raises considerations related to privacy, intellectual property, academic integrity, and accessibility. Continuous improvements to generative AI’s capabilities and changes in the way these tools are regulated will impact these considerations and Penn’s guidelines for tools and appropriate use.

Penn’s Office of Privacy notes that instructors are responsible for protecting students’ privacy when using AI. The guidelines for protecting student privacy are informed by the risk associated with the type of data being shared and the privacy agreements of the tool you are using. To learn more about how data risk is classified at Penn, visit ISC’s page on data risk classification levels.


Penn-licensed AI tools

Penn provides enterprise licenses to two AI tools for all members of the Penn community: Microsoft Copilot Chat and Grammarly Pro. These tools are approved for uses involving low-, moderate-, and most high-risk data, including FERPA-protected educational records and HIPAA-protected personal health information, only when you are logged in securely with your PennKey. Note that the university’s contract with Microsoft prohibits the use of Copilot Chat for grading student work.

Penn also holds an enterprise agreement with ChatGPT-EDU. This tool is available for purchase through school, department, or instructor funding. Faculty and staff who are interested in purchasing ChatGPT-EDU user licenses for themselves or on behalf of their students should contact their local IT support provider. ChatGPT-EDU is only approved for uses involving low- and moderate-risk data when you are logged in to Penn’s enterprise account. These protections do not apply to individual or team accounts created using a Penn email address.

If you wish to require your students use AI in their work, using one of the Penn-licensed tools is necessary to protect student privacy. For detailed information on all Penn-licensed AI tools, visit ISC’s page on Generative AI Tools & Resources.


Publicly available AI tools

While additional tools are publicly available, they do not ensure the same privacy protections as Penn-licensed tools. Penn’s Office of Privacy mandates the following restrictions for the protection of student data while using an unlicensed tool:

  • Do not enter any information that could identify a student. This includes names, ID numbers, or email addresses, as well as detailed descriptions of student work or engagement in class that could be identifiable to others.
  • Do not enter student work (e.g., papers, projects) without the student’s permission, even if it is anonymized. This work is part of the student’s confidential academic record.
  • Do not require students to enter their own work into an unlicensed AI tool or use it in assignments. Unlicensed tools may be optionally used by students at the instructor’s discretion, but consider using a Penn-licensed tool for mandatory components of coursework.

Additional Guidance on AI Use

Individual instructors determine their own policies related to generative AI use in your courses. If you plan to use a Penn-licensed AI tool to interact with student work, consider being transparent with students about how and why their work will be shared and protected. For more information about setting expectations for student AI use, visit the Course Policies & Communication page.

The Undergraduate Deans have also developed the Core Principles for Undergraduate Teaching and Learning to help you consider how your AI policies and practices might reflect the University Values of discovery and opportunity.

Information Systems and Computing (ISC) has additional guidance on AI use for members of the Penn community:

The Penn Libraries have collected resources on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence to inform your decision-making around the use of AI with copyrighted materials and the citation of AI-generated content.

Resources for AI in Teaching and Learning

Generative AI

More Resources