Opening Conversations With Students About GenAI

Regardless of your syllabus policy, it’s important to talk with students about the role of generative AI (GenAI) in your course. Teaching support professionals across UMN created the excellent resource “From Policy to Practice: Talking with Students About Generative AI,” which includes suggestions for discussing GenAI use with students.

We recommend talking regularly with students about GenAI use. At the start of the semester, you might ground your conversations with an anonymous survey about students’ practices and perspectives around GenAI use. (Wake Forest’s Center for Advancement of Teaching offers an excellent set of AI use scenarios to serve as a starting point for discussion.) Students often believe their peers use GenAI tools more widely than they actually do.

Students are likely encountering a range of policies across their courses, so regular reminders of your policy throughout the semester will be helpful. The capabilities and/or accessibility of GenAI tools may change over the course of a semester, raising new questions that require clarification or adaptation of your original policy.

Regularly revisiting your GenAI use expectations is particularly important if your policy provides different guidance for different assignments. Including a brief statement about GenAI guidelines in each assignment prompt is one helpful strategy. It can also be useful to discuss potential GenAI uses for any given assignment with students as you present the prompt, noting which uses might enhance or detract from students’ achievement of the learning outcomes for that assignment.

Some faculty members have noted that as students experiment with limited uses of GenAI tools, they may be tempted to use GenAI more extensively. Establishing clear limits and reasons for your restrictions is critical to creating a GenAI-aware classroom and limiting the risks of GenAI overuse and misuse.

Ultimately, encouraging an open dialogue rather than fear or silence around GenAI use encourages students to seek clarification and support rather than hiding their technology use.