Design and write AI policies | University at Albany

How can we design and write course policies about AI use that focus on student learning?

The emergence and widespread availability of generative AI tools has forced faculty to reexamine their course policies and consider where and how they should address students’ use of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their courses. While it might be tempting to simply use an AI policy that another instructor has developed, the reality is that each instructor will need to do this work for each course they teach. Courses, disciplines, and learning goals differ, and these differences have implications for whether, when, or how students should be using AI in your course. This guide will provide a framework to help you make these determinations. In addition, it will provide strategies to help you communicate those decisions as policies that help support your students’ learning.

This resource will walk you through three phases of thinking and planning to help you construct and communicate an AI policy for your course. This work is purposely broken into small steps so that you can work thoughtfully and deliberately, and we encourage you to pause and complete each phase as you read through this resource.

A note about policies as a guide for students’ learning

Let’s start by establishing a shared understanding of what an effective policy is and how policy can motivate students’ learning. Traditionally, many instructors have thought of policies as a set of rules that reward or punish specific student behaviors. However, the research on human learning suggests that there is a more productive way to think about a course policy: as an opportunity for instructors to consider how they want learning to happen in a course and for students to explore and commit to how they best learn.

When we think about policies in this way, we realize that before we design a policy about AI for our course, we need to start by exploring and articulating for ourselves whether or not artificial intelligence is a meaningful tool for our students to use as they develop the skills we want them to learn. Only after doing that exploratory work are we ready to define our AI policy and communicate it to students.

Phase 1: Uncover the role of AI in students’ learning in your course

In this phase, you will consider how you want learning to happen in your course so that you can determine whether AI has a role in that learning. Below are three steps that can help you do this work.

Step 1: Identify the key skills you want students to learn in your course.

The first step is to make some notes for yourself about the work that you ask students to do in your course. That work, broadly speaking, probably entails developing skills such as problem-solving skills, lab skills, discussion skills, research skills, or other broad categories of skills. After you have written notes about these broad categories, consider the subskills under each category that you want your students to learn. Try to be as concrete as possible.

Below are some examples to help you imagine what this list of skills might look like.

Broad category: Problem-solving skills
- Subskill: Identify key dimensions
- Subskill: Identify most salient contextual factors
Broad category: Lab skills
- Subskill: Create concrete plan for entire experiment
- Subskill: Make predictions about potential measurement error
Broad category: Discussion Skills
- Subskill: Prepare questions that help peers think
- Subskill: Create counterarguments in a discussion

Step 2: Identify the role of artificial intelligence in developing these skills.

After you’ve made your list, ask yourself this question for each skill and subskill: Would artificial intelligence help your students develop this skill? The question is not whether students could use AI to do this work, but instead if using AI will help them develop the skill you’re targeting. In some cases, you may find it easy to answer “yes” or “no”, and, in other cases, you may find that you initially have to answer “maybe” until you’ve taken more time to think! There are no right or wrong answers here: the most important thing is to make sure that your students’ learning is your primary consideration.

Step 3: Articulate why you made your decisions about artificial intelligence.

After you’ve considered whether using AI will help students develop the skills you’re targeting, take some time to articulate for yourself why you think the use of artificial intelligence might help or hinder your students’ learning.

In cases where you answer no, you may find yourself writing things like this: “I want my students to be able to edit writing without any assistance from AI. They won’t be able to evaluate the suggestions AI would make unless they have their own strongly developed sense of the components of good writing.”

In cases where you answer yes, you may find yourself writing things like this: “I see AI as a thinking partner, so it is okay for students to use AI to generate initial ideas for essays/projects as long as they are aware that this partner is limited, sometimes wrong or biased, and might hallucinate.”

Phase 2: Draft your AI policy

Communicating your decisions about students’ use of AI

In phase 1, you did some important groundwork for developing your policy: you articulated for yourself the learning you want students to do in your course and the role that AI will (or won’t) play in that learning. Now you’re ready to begin thinking about how you can articulate this important thinking to your students so they can see how your decisions will support their learning in your course.

Write in response to the prompts below to begin communicating why you have made specific decisions about AI use in your course.

Using your ideas from Step 1 and Step 2 above, explain to your students when you want them to use AI and when you don’t want them to use AI in your course.
Using your ideas from Step 3 above, explain to your students the reasons that you do or don’t want them to use AI as they develop the skills you want them to learn. This is best framed as explaining how AI will or won’t help them develop the skills and do the learning you want them to do.
Communicate this in terms of the assignments in your course (both formative and summative). You might also want to communicate this in terms of the skills that your course targets.

Below is an example of what this looks like in one course policy.

Our course helps you develop two key skills as a historian: research and writing. AI is not a productive technology to use in the research process for our course. When historians work with databases, archives, and complex primary and secondary sources to gather resources and make decisions about which ones to use and why, they are drawing on their analytic skills and also their ethical knowledge of the people, places, and things they study. I want you to learn these valuable skills. If you lean into AI, you won’t develop these skills, and you might produce historical thinking that is inaccurate and even harmful! As to the second key skill of writing, I want you to become more adept at reflecting on your emerging ideas and on your ability to provide evidence for those ideas. Again, this is your work, and I want you to engage with it. However, we can use AI to provide feedback on our historical arguments and I will structure your use of the technology as you do this. Your thinking and writing on each step of our longer history paper should be done by you, but we will use AI as an instrument we can turn to give us the feedback we are looking for.

Framing your policy as guidance to help students learn

Just as our students want help making ethical decisions about using AI in their learning, they want to know how our plans will help them do that learning. When we focus on student learning rather than on student behaviors, students are much more likely to take our policy to heart.

This means your policy needs to be framed as an inviting appeal that essentially says, “I want you do this because it will help you learn! This is for you.” Your policy should help them see the learning benefit of what you are suggesting.

Write in response to the prompts below to begin communicating why the decisions you have made will help them learn in your course.

Generate some language that explains to students that you and your guidelines are here to help them learn. This should be language that you can use to frame your policy to convince students that you care about their learning.
Describe how you will help them regulate their behavior and the temptation to use AI when it is not appropriate to do so. (For example, maybe students will have many low-stakes assessments, so they don’t need to feel anxious about their performance on any one assessment. Maybe they will do a lot of work in class with you or get support from peers, tutors, and you, so that they won’t need to be tempted to take shortcuts.)

Below is an example of what this looks like in one course policy.

I understand the kind of stressors that undergraduates face, and I know how tempting it is to lean into technology like AI or take other shortcuts when things feel overwhelming. But my guidelines about AI use are here because I want you to learn how to research and write as a historian: without learning these skills, you will be robbed of an opportunity to be a fuller, more informed person and citizen. Your learning and growth is why I have these guidelines in place. I have created a set of writing assignments that I know you can manage! Our history paper is broken down into small chunks of weekly work and your peers and I will be providing feedback to guide you. And, in some class meetings, I will structure your use of AI to provide feedback on your writing. But you don’t need to use it anywhere else: you will get plenty of support during this course, so you don’t need to use AI inappropriately.

Phase 3: Use your policy to open a conversation with your students

A policy alone won’t really help students pause, reflect, and monitor their own learning and their relationship to AI! Students (and all of us) need to develop our thoughts about AI and explore artificial intelligence together. Use your policy to begin this conversation: explore and discuss your policy and/or artificial intelligence in your discipline with students so that they understand and are motivated to work with your ideas about how they will best learn in your course. Below are four different ways to have this conversation. Read these four plans and make some notes about how you could use one or more of these conversation plans.

Conversation plan #1 - Have students examine your policy

Ask students to read your policy and then write down two things they find helpful and two genuine questions they have about your policy. Have students share these reactions in small groups and reach consensus on what they find helpful and what questions they’d like to discuss. Have groups share out and then make time for a whole class discussion.

Conversation plan #2 - Discuss why students will or won't use AI

If you don’t want students to use AI, it is important that you give them an opportunity to consider how doing work without artificial intelligence will help them learn and grow. Alternately, if you do want students to use AI, students also need to articulate how using artificial intelligence will support their learning.

To facilitate this conversation, ask students to generate their ideas and share those ideas with peers and then with the whole class. Have students respond to prompts like these:

How will completing this course/assignment (with/without AI) prepare me for work in other courses or in my major?
How will the work of this course/assignment (using/not using AI) help me develop as a person beyond my academic work?

Conversation plan #3 - Explore the limitations of AI

You may want to explore the uses and limitations of AI with your students. This is often best done by having students do some analytic work. For example, you could ask students to evaluate two short arguments, one generated by AI and one by a person. Do not reveal that one argument was AI-generated. Students’ evaluations will allow you and them to uncover some of the problems with arguments generated by AI. If you want students to explore what AI does well, have them analyze AI-generated work and consider how it could support their work.

Conversation plan #4 - Have students make decisions about using AI

If you have decided that students can and should negotiate their use of AI with you (and perhaps with each other), structure that conversation so that they can explore their reasons for wanting or not wanting to use AI.
Have students read through an assignment and then respond to prompts like these:

What step(s) might AI help you with?
What would be some of the drawbacks of using AI on this assignment?
How might you use AI intentionally and critically on this assignment?

References

Bowen, J. A., & Watson, C. E. (2024). Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Harrington, C., & Thomas, M. (2018). Designing a Motivating Syllabus. Stylus Publishing.

Hirsch, C. C. (2010). The promising syllabus enacted: One teacher’s experience. Communication Teacher, 24(2), 78-90.

Lang, J. (2020). Distracted: Why students can’t focus and what you can do about it. Basic Books.

Palmer, M.S., Wheeler, L.B., & Aneece, I. (2016). Does the document matter? The evolving role of syllabi in higher education. Change, 48(4), 36-46.