Building an AI Policy for Your Course: Why It Matters

Building an AI Policy for Your Course: Why It Matters

By Diana Letts-Piedrahita August 27th, 2024

In today’s rapidly evolving educational landscape, incorporating AI-powered technology into your course requires more than just adopting new tools—it demands a clear, well-defined AI-powered technology adaptation policy that fits within your teaching philosophy. Creating such a policy is crucial for several reasons, all of which contribute to a more effective, fair, inclusive and accessible learning environment.

An AI policy promotes clarity and transparency. By outlining how AI tools are expected to be used in your course, you set clear expectations for students from the outset, preventing misunderstandings and ensuring everyone is on the same page.

Consistency is another key benefit. A written AI policy ensures that rules are applied uniformly across all students, particularly in assessments. This consistency helps avoid perceived or actual unfairness, ensuring that every student is held to the same standard.

Moreover, an AI policy allows for customization to course needs. Different courses have unique goals and challenges, and a tailored policy enables you to address these specific needs. Whether AI is used for research, writing, outlining, or problem-solving, a customized policy ensures that the technology is used appropriately and effectively within your class context.

The promotion of ethical use is also central to an AI policy. By guiding students (learners) on when and how AI tools can be beneficial, and when they might undermine the learning process, you foster responsible use of technology in academic work. This ethical framework is essential as AI continues to play a larger role in education.

As AI tools evolve, so should your course policies. A course-specific AI policy allows you to adapt to these changes, ensuring that your guidelines remain relevant and effective as new tools and challenges arise.

However, creating an AI policy is just the first step. It’s equally important to test, assess, and demonstrate how AI-powered technology will be used in your course. This ensures that the tools you choose are effective and relevant to your learning objectives and course outcomes. By experimenting with these tools, you can assess whether they truly enhance learning or assessment, making adjustments as needed to ensure they contribute to student success.

Demonstrating AI tools in class, early in the term, builds student confidence and competency, helping them understand the potential benefits of AI while also fostering a balanced, ethical relationship with technology. This approach also enhances fairness in assessment, as it allows you to ensure that AI- powered tools are unbiased and aligned with your grading criteria.

Engaging with AI tools allows for continuous improvement. By reflecting on your approaches and strategies, by gathering data and feedback, you can refine both your teaching methods and student learning outcomes, keeping your course content dynamic and responsive to new developments.

Building a tailored AI policy and thoughtfully integrating AI-powered technology into your course not only enhances teaching and learning but also ensures that these tools are used effectively, ethically, and in alignment with your course outcomes and teaching philosophy.

Here is an example of Course Outline AI policies for your consideration:

AI Policy:

AI-powered applications and online translation tools:

PLEASE READ! Please take note of the following information regarding the use of AI-powered applications and online translation tools in our class. We will utilize language-based tools such as ChatGPT to generate text. In our first week of classes, we’ll explore how we plan to integrate AI-powered technology into our course. Together, we’ll examine its capabilities as a tutor and a learning tool to enhance your learning outcomes and experience.

While online AI-powered tools are publicly available, they often produce results that are less accurate and reliable and may contain biases, stereotypes, and misleading information detrimental to your learning needs and current context. Please be aware that utilizing automatic translation aids or AI-powered tools in your written work without proper citation (https://library.ulethbridge.ca/cite?hs=a) will result in a grade of zero, even if the assignment is grammatically correct. Your instructor will be able to identify the use of these tools. “ Letts-Piedrahita, D. L. (2024)