Model How Students Should Use AI
As Sarah Elaine Eaton, an associate professor in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, notes in this article on GenAI and academic integrity, “If we expect students to act with integrity, then we as educators have to act with integrity and model that behavior.” If instructors expect students to be transparent about how they use GenAI tools, instructors and staff members at the College should be equally transparent about how they use GenAI tools.
- Show students a draft of a research paper or a project brief and point out where you used AI for outlining or brainstorming.
- Explain why you chose to use AI for a specific task (e.g., “I used Gemini to help me summarize these three articles”) and why you chose not to use it for others.
- Show an instance where AI gave you a “hallucination” or a poor design suggestion to demonstrate why human oversight is essential.
- Add captions that include when AI images were generated and used.
- Add disclaimers or notes to your Canvas course, course pages, documents, webpages, or emails/newsletters to identify when AI was used and at what level.
Examples: AI Transparency Statements
- In Course Communication (such as Canvas Announcements & Emails)
- The Practice: Adding a small transparency note at the bottom of written communication.
- What it looks like: “Note: This week’s announcement was drafted by me and polished for clarity using Grammarly. The header image was generated using Adobe Firefly to visualize our upcoming project theme.”
- In Slide Decks and Presentations
- The Practice: Treating AI-generated images like any other cited source in a lecture.
- What it looks like: A caption directly beneath an image on a slide: “Image generated by Midjourney, 2024. Prompt: ‘Abstract Bauhaus-style composition with charcoal textures.'”
- In Technical Documentation (Coding & Software)
- The Practice: Highlighting AI-assisted work during a live demo or in a shared file.
- What it looks like: “I used an AI assistant to help me write the base logic for this CSS grid, but I manually adjusted the column spacing and responsive breakpoints to fit our specific layout.”
- In Research and Artist Statements
- The Practice: Disclosing the use of AI as a brainstorming partner.
- What it looks like: “I used Google Gemini to help me brainstorm synonyms and metaphors for ‘decay’ to help refine the tone of my artist statement. The final text was written entirely by me based on those concepts.”
Teach Citation
Citation practices have long been key to academic integrity, as a way of ensuring that learners are properly crediting others’ work. Citation practices related to GenAI tools are still being developed, but the following resources provide some example citational practices that you might require in your course:
- Sweetland Center for Writing, Citation Conventions for GenAI and Chatbots.
You might also consider giving students a plagiarism assignment in which you provide them with a sample presentation, detail how it was created, and ask students to reflect on whether the AI elements are cited correctly.
It is important to note that, as GenAI becomes integrated into more platforms, citation practices may continue to shift. For example, it remains to be seen whether citation of GenAI will make sense if word processors such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs continue to automate the process of providing AI-generated options.