Creating Guidelines for the Use of Gen AI Across Campus
Generative AI is manifesting in lots of different ways; the tools proliferate, and it seems that the issues proliferate as well. One of the ways that we have enumerated the areas that we need to address is to get stakeholder input. For the research guidelines, for example, we drew heavily from the questions that office was already receiving from campus stakeholders. For the instructional guidelines, we had roughly five, six months' worth of interactions with faculty that our teaching center had done already, in holding workshops or one-on-one consultations or just communicating about the technology. We drew from those to determine the most urgent questions and needs that that our faculty were articulating. And we broke those down in terms of guidance around: a) course policies for generative AI, and b) what things faculty need to know about the technology, because it's a firehose — there's a lot you could learn. How can we filter all of that to the critical things that faculty need to know around concerns and opportunities and what it can do for teaching and learning? Thirdly, we developed guidance around how to incorporate it into the curriculum with assignments. Whether you want those assignments to encourage AI or discourage AI, how do we design those in a way that's student-centered, that's still good practice in terms of the learning that's supposed to happen in the class? What kinds of principles should we follow there? So those are the three main areas: course policies, things to be aware of, and how do we incorporate it into our classes.
CT: So by listening to the questions that faculty and researchers have, they're telling you what guidelines they need, and that gives you a great place to start. But is it possible to develop guidelines fast enough to keep up with changes in the technology?
Conatser: It does change pretty quickly, doesn't it? In our guidelines, no matter what the guidelines are about, we're writing in there that we plan on continuously reviewing the state of the field and making any adjustments to the guidelines as necessary. The guidelines represent our best understanding at the time, and we are committed to refreshing them on a regular basis.
For the instructional guidelines, our refresh cycle has been per semester. We look at all of our recommendations and the statements that we're making about generative AI, compare them to any newer or more emergent areas of understanding, experience, and research, and we say, does this still reflect our understanding? Is this still accurate? Do we still think this is a good recommendation? Between the August and December guidelines, we didn't do an about-face for any of the recommendations, but we did find a need to clarify or review the research on a few things. For example, our initial recommendation on AI detectors was that we don't think they're very reliable. We wanted to look at the newest research about them and see, are they any better now? Is there better research now that might complicate our previous statements? We ended up finding research that led us to take even firmer language around detectors the second time around.
One thing that I think is unique about our recommendations is how evidence-based our work has been. We're being transparent about our references for the guidelines and what's informed our decision-making. For this to be a persuasive endeavor, it needs to be as rigorous as any kind of scholarly activity that you would expect at a university like UK.
CT: How do you balance creating guidelines that are comprehensive yet concise enough that people will actually read them?
Conatser: We've kept the guidelines relatively short, making sure to provide enough elaboration so that it's not without context and it's not without actionable specificity. But what we've also learned is that the guidelines represent one step among many at our institution. Rather than just saying, "Here are the guidelines, go forth and use them," it's important to have an institutional mechanism to socialize those guidelines in different areas of the university. For the instructional guidelines, for example, that's become part of the culture of our teaching centers, workshops, and consultations and programming with faculty. When you have groups that can take the guidelines and the use them actively in whatever kinds of trainings or professional activities they do, that keeps socializing them and making them accessible to faculty.