Teaching Strategies

Generative AI in Teaching and Learning

There are many artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can generate “human-like” responses to a wide range of questions and statements. Among the most popular generative AI (or GenAI) tools is ChatGPT, a text-based tool that can produce essays, reports, lesson plans, and more. Boston College students will likely use content from these tools in various ways, including as substitutes for their own thinking and writing. Like other technologies that have created new opportunities for academic dishonesty (e.g. Wikipedia, calculators, etc.), Generative AI invites instructional responses that promote academic integrity and authentic student learning without sacrificing trust in instructor-student or student-student relationships.

Limitations of GenAI

While Generative AI can produce text that can pass for human-created work, it does have many significant limitations depending on the tool and the task.

Faculty Concerns

Faculty have raised several questions and concerns since ChatGPT was released in November 2022:

• How will we know if students are submitting original work?
• Should we ban the use of AI tools?
• If we assume students will use AI, how can the content it produces be cited?
• Are there ways that AI can be used to help students learn?
• Can we use AI for course design?

Tools for Detecting AI

Several tools do exist that claim to detect AI-generated content. For-profit services like Originality.AI claim to have 94% accuracy in identifying text produced by ChatGPT. Among the free tools are:

• openai-detector
• Gltr.io
• GPTZero
• CrossPlag

While these tools may be helpful in some cases, there are also significant downsides to using these tools:

• Research shows that detectors are unreliable and biased against several populations.
• It is unsustainable for faculty to run every one of their students’ submissions through these services. It is not only an enormous time-consuming process, it is also likely that the services will be inaccurate.
• Using these tools creates an adversarial relationship with students wherein they are taught that being caught cheating is worse than choosing to use the service in the first place. 

Below are instructional responses to Generative AI, including short- and long-term interventions. 

Instructional Responses to ChatGPT

Instructional responses to the use of GenAI and similar tools vary depending on how much time and energy faculty have to make course-level or assignment-level changes. The short-term solutions provided below are meant to serve as an immediate response that should be revisited when time permits. The long-term approaches, on the other hand, are meant to prompt students to think more critically about the technology and their own intellectual formation.   

While the advent of GenAI poses new questions to address, strategies that limit academic dishonesty in general remain as relevant and effective as they have been before AI.

Course Design: Short-Term Interventions

Update Your Syllabus

The following sample statements should be taken as starting points to craft your own policy. When adding an AI-specific policy to a syllabus, consider how to personalize the policy depending on the norms of each department and course, along with BC’s institutional policies and protocols.

Syllabus Statement 1

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tool Usage: AI tools can generate text, images, and other media very quickly. Since a central goal of this course is to help you become independent and critical thinkers, using Generative AI tools to create text, video, audio, or images that end up in your work (assignments, activities, responses, etc) may be considered a violation of academic integrity policies. Before choosing to use GenAI for coursework, reach out to me about appropriate and inappropriate uses.

Syllabus Statement 2 (Treat AI-generated text as a source)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tool Usage: AI tools can generate text, images, and other media very quickly. Since a central goal of this course is to help you become independent and critical thinkers, using Generative AI tools to create text, video, audio, or images that end up in your work (assignments, activities, responses, etc) may be considered a violation of academic integrity policies. Before choosing to use GenAI for coursework, reach out to me about appropriate and inappropriate uses. If you choose to use GenAI to complete assignments, indicate on your assignment how the technology was used. If any part of this policy is confusing, please reach out to me for a conversation before submitting your work.  

Policy Statement Clearinghouse

A regularly updated list of existing policies for the use of AI tools at various institutions is available online. BC faculty choosing to adapt these policies for their own syllabi may need to edit them in light of BC institutional policies and protocols, as well as departmental and course context.

Discuss GenAI With Students

Allocate some time in class to discuss the role of GenAI in your students’ intellectual development. The conversation can be a way to discuss how the technology works, the ethical considerations, your own expectations, as well as a way for students to share their varied perspectives. Discussion prompts and questions can include:

• What are some ways you have seen students use GenAI?
• In what ways does Generative AI impact the goals you have for this course and for you as a student at BC? In what ways can GenAI prevent or enable you from learning?
• What are the differences between different AI technologies? How are spellcheck, Grammarly, GPS, and ChatGPT different?
• How does the use of Wikipedia to complete classwork compare with the use of GenAI to complete classwork?
• How do you feel about how your fellow students use GenAI?

CTE’s resource on how to make Academic Integrity transparent can be a useful guide for these conversations. Additionally, the BC Library has a helpful guide for orienting students to Generative AI.

Additional Short-Term Course Design Interventions

Additional short-term approaches to the pedagogical challenges faced by the development of GenAI can be found on Ryan Watkins’ educational technology blog.

Course Design: Long-Term Approaches

Cultivating a learner-centered course climate is fundamental to designing a course that addresses the challenges and opportunities we face with the advent of GenAI. In general, the more that syllabi and assessments make your teaching goals transparent to the students, the more likely you will be able to have an honest conversation about the pros and cons of GenAI for your class. Techniques that demonstrate your primary interest in the intellectual development of your students can be demonstrated in various ways.

Break Up Major Assignments

Divide major assignments into smaller graded components that build on each other. This “scaffolding” approach requires students to incorporate feedback on earlier assignments to improve their later assignments. The CTE’s guidance on assignment design explains how making such changes can positively harness student motivation and deter academic dishonesty.

Distribute Grading

When students feel that their grades on one or two assignments determine their course grade, they often feel more pressure to focus on creating a perfect “product” rather than learning how improvements to their understanding can be made. By creating more lower-stakes graded assignments, instructors encourage students to demonstrate learning as a continuous activity.

Assess Student Workload

As indicated in the resource, Underlying Reasons for Academic Dishonesty, one common reason students might use a tool like ChatGPT to cheat is that the overall workload expected of them seems excessive. What is considered excessive, of course, is relative. One measure of workload can be found at Rice University’s workload estimator tool, which estimates the time it might take a student to complete specific tasks.

Assignment Design: Short-Term Interventions

Try running your assignment prompts through various GenAI tools. Would you consider the responses as meeting or exceeding expectations? If so, consider what kinds of adjustments need to be made to the assignment. Does it need to be more challenging? Does it need to be more specific to in-class discussions or lectures?

Require Recent References

GenAI tends to struggle to provide recent and accurate references when prompted to use sources accessible behind paywalls. While this is not universally true for all GenAI tools, it is true for most of the tools. Consider asking students to use current events, recent newspaper sources, or very recent academic articles to ground their thinking. Ask students to verify that the sources they cite exist by providing links to the source.

Add Reflection to Assignment

Ask students to provide a reflective essay in addition to the paper or exam itself. The objective would be to allow students to show their thinking and explain how certain decisions were made. Sometimes called “exam wrappers,” these reflections personalize each submission and give students a chance to explain in detail how their thinking led to the product. 

Show Students How to Cite

Each of the standard citation styles provides formatting examples for content generated by AI. Direct students to the BC Libraries resource on citation styling.

Assignment Design: Long-Term Approaches

Teach with GenAI

Ask students to analyze the output of the AI for a question that could easily be asked as part of an assignment. In the analysis, see if students can differentiate the output with something that a human would produce. For example:

• Does the output have a “style” of writing that makes it distinct?
• Does the AI rely on clichés or casual speech in a manner that is inappropriate for the topic?
• How would a student rewrite the AI output to be more accurate or more distinct?

A thoughtful framework on ways to teach students to write with AI from Glenn Kleiman can be referenced for further reading.

If choosing to teach with GenAI, privacy concerns should be discussed openly. BC offers access to GenAI tools that protect data from being used to train the various AI chatbots. For a list of tools and data privacy assurances, visit the ITS Generative Artificial Intelligence site.

Since many student continue to use ChatGPT, the most popular of these tools, consider asking students to review ChatGPT’s privacy policy Students should be made aware that signing up authorizes ChatGPT to share “Personal Information” with third parties without notice and that they must provide their cell phone number to the service. In addition, ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI discloses that:

• It can access any information fed into or created by its technology
• It uses log-in data, tracking, and other analytics
• The technology does not respond to “Do Not Track”

Plan for Social Annotation of Text

Tools like Perusall can be enormously useful in not only ensuring students read a given text, but also in prompting critical engagement with the readings. 

If interested in using Perusall, you can review CTE’s resources on Persuall and set up a consultation with us if needed by emailing centerforteaching@bc.edu.

Alternative Assignments

A very helpful — if overwhelming — resource for alternative assessments can be a useful guide when rethinking assignment types. The “Guide to Alternative Assessments 2.0” PDF is particularly salient for multimodality.

Future Impact of AI on Teaching and Learning

The strategies suggested above respond to what we know about AI tools today; however, such technologies will improve and so our teaching will improve with them.

In the long run, instructional responses that engage the technology and its limits — rather than seek to simply ban them — promise to be more effective ways to meet learning goals across disciplines. Such strategies may also help faculty find new ways to respond to other persistent challenges in higher education, such as:

• How can AI tools be used ethically and strategically for our curriculum?
• How can they be used to teach students about information literacy, data privacy, and intellectual property?
• Can AI be used to promote more equitable learning experiences for students, especially those who have faced structural barriers to resources? See Equity and Academic Integrity for a reference on how accusations of cheating are disproportionately aimed at underrepresented learners.
• Should we find more ways to assess the process of learning and not just the product?

The CTE will continue to update this resource with suggestions, strategies, and perspectives that can inform faculty decisions on these questions.