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| Way back before Thanksgiving, after an academic integrity board hearing, I chatted with the student board members about their sense of AI issues in daily student life. They said it feels like there is a growing gulf between classes that use AI regularly and don’t identify any significant limits to AI use vs. classes where AI use is strictly prohibited across the board.
We talked about how this creates confusion, especially when AI is increasingly baked into so many online tools. Our conversation confirmed what Lori Robbins explained at the August faculty symposium: our students are not all yearning to abandon their thinking to AI. But they are feeling increasingly confused and eager to have some clarity about AI expectations in their classes. And on the other hand, many faculty feel frustrated about the challenge of identifying prohibited AI use and the ways that AI can create obstacles to student learning. The students and I agreed that these anxieties on all sides risk eroding the trust between students and faculty that is fundamental to our campus relationships. I asked whether it would help mitigate student anxieties if each professor talked through how the use of and/or limitation on AI in a particular course connects to the course learning goals. The students responded enthusiastically, an important reminder that for a generation of students who often spent high school being taught “to the test,” rather than exploring the value of their own thinking, explaining our reasoning about how and why we structure our classes the way we do is crucial if we want them to embrace the challenges of college-level learning. But as AI has stormed onto the scene, we have not had much time to sit back and really think through the possibilities and pitfalls of AI (beyond our gut reactions to embrace or reject), much less how to talk about any of this with our students. Our 2026 January CfLT Workshops (see descriptions below) will carve out space for reflecting, brainstorming, and intentional decision-making related to student learning and persistence, generative AI, and tech more broadly. The goal is to walk away from these meetings (one or all of them) with a variety of actionable items that you can try out in your spring courses, whether that is experimenting with entirely new assignments or simply making sure that your thinking about AI is transparent to your students. |