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Assignment Design

20Mar’24

Generative AI

Effective assignment design is one way to set students up for success in their learning. This page provides a framework and examples for designing assignments that help students learn effectively in the age of AI.  

Along with designing assignments, it’s vital to consider how you communicate with students about AI use in coursework. These resources are a starting point; schedule a consultation with a CETLI staff member to discuss detailed questions and considerations specific to your courses.

Considerations for Designing Assignments

  • Determine the goals of the assignment. What learning do you want students to achieve by completing a particular assignment or assessment?  
  • Identify how AI use relates to your goals. There may be some uses of AI that support your learning goals for students and others that impede them. Decisions about acceptable and unacceptable AI uses should be informed by your learning goals and may vary by assignment. 
  • Develop your own AI literacy. Understanding the variety of ways AI can be used in order to help you make informed AI-related instructional decisions. 
  • Use a variety of strategies to help students develop skills. Consider how your assignments fit together. Specifically, what expertise do students need to use AI productively in your discipline? Where can you integrate opportunities for students to build knowledge and skills? 
  • Reflect on your evaluation practices. How can you ensure that your grading places the emphasis on the learning you most want students to accomplish? 

Assignment Design Approaches

Your goals for a particular assignment will determine your design approach. This means that the role of AI might not be the same for every assignment in your course. 

To help you define the role of AI, consider whether your assignment might be: 

AI-free. The goal of the task is for students to engage in unaided thinking. Rather than solely relying on students to limit their own AI use, the way the assignment is designed makes it very difficult to use AI to complete the assignment. 

AI-exploratory. The goal of the assignment is to help students learn to use AI tools productively in your academic discipline. Students should reflect on how AI is contributing to the task they want to accomplish. 

AI-assisted. The goal of this assignment is for students to produce their own work, with the supportive assistance of AI tools. Students should demonstrate evidence of their own mastery of the content, beyond what an AI tool could produce. 

The differences between these designs are based primarily on the learning goals you want students to achieve, rather than the specific task. Learning to use AI productively in your academic context is a skill that can be scaffolded for students through opportunities for practice that include all three assignment types. 

This framework is intended to be a guide, not a strict prescription, and is adapted from The Next Era of Assessment and the AI Assessment Scale. 

AI-Free Assignments

If your goal is for students to demonstrate unaided thinking, you may wish to design an AI-free assignment. As you develop this assignment, consider these important factors: 

  • Use class time to engage students in independent thinking. Opportunities to complete portions of the assignment with access to instructor and peer support can help to ensure that students work on critical stages of the assignment without relying on AI.  
  • Expect that the work students produce will be less polished. For example, a handwritten, in-class writing sample is likely to contain fewer complex ideas and sources. 
  • Be mindful of your own capacity. Depending on your course size and format, individualized meetings, presentations, and other interactions may need to take different forms. 
  • Plan for accessibility. Some analog tasks do not support assistive technologies that many students rely on to be academically successful. Be prepared to offer flexible options that enable students with diverse learning needs to produce their best work.

Accordion Content

To engage students in unaided critical thinking, you might have students: 

  • Work in class on a portion of the assignment for which unaided thinking is particularly vital, then complete remaining portions at home. 
  • Give a presentation or lightning talk that includes live Q+A from their classmates.  
  • Use in-class time to annotate a take-home assignment with notes explaining their thinking process 
  • Meet individually with you to discuss their thinking process for an assignment. 
  • Complete a proctored in-class exam, writing sample, or other activity. 
  • Produce a reflection or response about content discussed verbally during class. 
  • Spend a portion of class time working collaboratively with peers, then submit evidence of their in-class work. 

AI-Exploratory Assignments

If you want students to learn how to use AI productively in the context of your discipline, they will need opportunities to practice through AI-exploratory assignments or activities. Students build AI literacy while developing discipline-related knowledge within your field. As you plan these assignments, consider: 

  • Digital native ≠ digitally productive. Your students may be familiar with generative AI tools, but they don’t necessarily know how to use them in an academic context. 
  • Provide explicit AI instruction to enable productive academic uses. Unless the instructor provides specific strategies and structure, students may actually perform worse when using AI for academic tasks. 
  • Help students identify productive – and unproductive – uses of AI. Engaging students in experimentation and reflection on AI’s abilities and weaknesses can guide them toward better choices around how they engage with it academically. 
  • Explore a variety of AI strategies. Many students (and instructors) have only used AI in the context of asking questions to a chatbot. AI-exploratory assignments can be an opportunity to discover creative ways of using AI to assist with different tasks. 

Accordion Content

To provide opportunities to learn and practice productive AI use in your academic discipline, you might have students: 

  • Evaluate strengths, weaknesses, and differences between multiple AI-generated problem-solving approaches to the same task to help students develop a deeper understanding of AI’s capabilities and explore problem-solving strategies in your field. 
  • Determine and implement strategies for fact-checking AI-generated assertions.  
  • Prompt AI to generate responses on a topic the student knows a lot about. Have students evaluate how different prompt characteristics impact the quality and accuracy of AI responses.  
  • Research prompting practices that are emerging in your field or discipline.  
  • Create custom instructions for AI to help with a specific, challenging task. Share the results with peers and evaluate the effectiveness of each others’ results.  
  • Engage in group discussion or individual reflection on the ways AI was helpful and not helpful in completing a learning task, where there was potential for students to be led astray by AI, and how they could mitigate this risk. 

AI-Assisted Assignments

To help students test their thinking, accelerate their learning, or get feedback on their ideas, you might design AI-assisted assignments. The goals of these assignments are discipline-based, and students are encouraged to use AI as one of many tools to assist their efforts toward achieving those goals.  

AI-assisted assignments may still have expectations around what are acceptable and unacceptable uses of the tools. These should be based on the goals of the assignment, with consideration for how they can be reasonably enforced. As you develop assignments, consider: 

  • Scaffolded strategies can help students use AI more productively. When students embark on an AI-assisted assignment, they will produce better work if they know how to use AI to assist them effectively. 
  • Evaluation practices are a strong motivator. Place grading and feedback emphasis on elements of the task where you expect students to perform better than what AI could produce. This rewards students who use AI as a collaborator instead of a replacement for their own thinking. 
  • Set expectations for how students should disclose their AI use. Set up a procedure for students to acknowledge AI’s contributions to their work, and consider modeling this practice in your teaching. This de-stigmatizes AI use and contributes to an atmosphere of trust between the instructor and students. 

Accordion Content

AI-assisted assignments can take many forms. Some specific examples that enable students to enhance or augment their learning through AI assistance include: 

  • Engage in a dialogue explaining a particular course concept to an AI tool that has been configured to respond as someone unfamiliar with the material. Consider having students also submit a reflection on what they learned from the process.  
  • Converse with AI as it role-plays a persona, such as a stakeholder in a case study or a patient in a clinical conversation.  
  • Use AI to generate case studies, scenarios, or practice questions to aid in studying or preparation.  
  • Engage with an AI tool for assistance with organizing, mapping, or visualizing complex ideas. 
  • Ask AI for feedback on early drafts of work before submitting revised versions to the instructor, especially in circumstances where individualized instructor feedback is not possible at every stage of a project. 
  • Use AI-assisted coding to enable students without a coding background to analyze complex data. 

CETLI Can Help

CETLI staff are available to discuss ideas or concerns related to generative AI and your teaching, and we can work with your program or department to facilitate conversations about this technology. Contact CETLI to learn more.

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