Generative AI & Your Teaching

Penn provides faculty, staff, and student access to various generative AI platforms. Some tools are available for free by logging in with your PennKey, while others require a budget code to purchase a user license. The list of provided tools changes frequently. Visit Penn AI Tools & Policies for available tools and instructions to access them. 

It’s up to individual instructors to determine if AI aligns with their teaching aims and if it’s something they see value in allowing or implementing within their courses. Some Penn instructors prohibit AI entirely or only allow it for very specific uses. 

Whether you choose to use AI in your teaching or not, you should communicate your expectations clearly with students. 

Penn instructors are using AI in their teaching in a variety of ways, including to:  

• Help develop assessments, course resources, and in-class active learning exercises.  
• Develop learning activities facilitated by AI tools, such as AnswerQ&A-Bots, dialogue and role-playing exercises, and custom apps. 
• Deepen students’ AI literacy related to how AI intersects with course topics. 
• Engage students in learning activities or assignments where students use AI in appropriate ways that further learning goals. 

CETLI offers a number of programs to facilitate conversations between instructors about how they are currently using AI in their teaching, as well as programs to introduce instructors to specific AI tools to support specific teaching goals. Visit the CETLI events page to see upcoming events related to AI and teaching.  

AI can be a powerful tool to support or undermine learning. Students can use it to help them study and to better understand concepts. However, students can also use AI to take shortcuts: it can write a paper for them, it can summarize the reading, and it can give them the answer to homework or problem-set questions. There is no assignment that students cannot use AI to complete.

As a result, instructors need to have a clear policy on AI use and help students understand what they must do without AI assistance in order to learn, as well as where AI assistance can be valuable. 

There are a variety of strategies for “prompt engineering,” or providing plain-language instructions to an AI tool, and the best approach depends on the type of task you want to execute.

In general, be specific in your request, and consider providing examples of the type of output you want. For more detailed recommendations, visit our page on prompting strategies. 

Custom chatbots can enhance certain aspects of teaching and learning when they are carefully implemented in ways that address pedagogical goals.

CETLI can assist with many aspects of the bot-building process, including defining your needs, selecting the appropriate platform, building, testing, and evaluating. Request a consultation to get personalized help from our staff.  

Penn encourages instructors to set their own AI policies at the course or assignment level. You may create one policy for the entire course, or policies that vary by assignment type and goals. Policies may allow students to use AI always, never, or only in certain situations. For resources on AI course policies, see: 

• Course Policies & Expectations 
• Sample AI policies from Penn courses 

• Core Principles for Undergraduate Teaching & Learning from the undergraduate deans 

Your course AI policy may include a requirement that students disclose or cite AI if they use it in coursework. The nature of this disclosure is up to you. Regardless of format, ensure that students know they will not be penalized for being honest. Some options include: 

• Follow the AI citation guidance of a common style guide. APA, Chicago, and MLA each offer formats for reference list, parenthetical, and/or footnote citations of AI output.  
• Ask students to directly show how they engaged with AI by including screenshots or chat transcripts of interactions along with their assignment submission. 
• Create an AI disclosure that students submit with assignments, serving as a starting point for conversations about how specific uses of AI shaped their process. 
• Have students engage in a post-assignment self-reflection to help them informally evaluate the ways that AI impacted their learning experience. 

Having an AI policy in place will help you define for your students what is and is not appropriate. Sometimes, student misuse is clear: fabricated sources or quotes may be a sign that students have used AI and are always a violation of Penn’s Code of Academic Integrity.    

In other cases, student AI use may not be as clear. Often, faculty suspect a student has used AI if the language in their writing is bland or vague, but sometimes those qualities reflect the student’s own work. If you suspect a student has used AI in a way that violates your course policy, have a conversation with the student. You can begin the conversation with questions or statements like: 

• I’m interested in understanding how you reached this conclusion. 
• Can you talk to me about the process you used to draft this? 
• How did you think about the organization of your work? 

You may discuss suspected student misuse of AI with the Center for Community Standards & Accountability, which handles academic integrity violations. Their staff can consult with you about your concerns and help you plan next steps, whether or not you intend to refer the student for further investigation. 

In all cases, you should not upload the student’s work into an “AI detector.” Uploading a student’s work without their consent is a violation of FERPA and Penn’s privacy policies. These tools are also not accurate enough to be treated as evidence of misconduct as they exhibit frequent bias.