Exploring the Potential for Teaching

Generative AI is rapidly becoming integrated into everyday tools used by students, instructors and employers. Re-designing course assessments to address this reality – whether to incorporate or mitigate student use – often requires significant time, thoughtful consideration, and careful planning. Our Teaching Excellence and Innovation team recognizes the diverse teaching contexts across disciplines. We offer both individual and program-level support to help you find sustainable solutions for assessment redesign that align with your class size, curriculum, and grading capacity.

Familiarizing yourself with generative AI through experimentation can provide valuable insights into its capabilities and limitations. Exploration of AI tools helps instructors make informed decisions about how AI might impact assessment design. However, it’s important to be aware that as AI tools proliferate, changes to terms of use may occur at any time and some may require payment for use.

We recognize that faculty have diverse approaches to technology integration. This resource provides suggestions for incorporating AI tools strategically within courses, while also offering strategies to mitigate unauthorized AI use. Open communication with students is key. Discussing AI use with your students at the outset sets clear expectations. Clarify how AI can and cannot be used in your specific course, ensuring alignment with course objectives, student learning outcomes, activities, and assessments. Explore sample course syllabi statements that define acceptable use of AI in courses.
As course requirements and student experiences differ across courses, transparency regarding authorized AI use fosters an open and responsible learning environment.

As with all academic work, upholding academic integrity is paramount. Any use of AI requires that both students and instructors accurately acknowledge AI sources or tools consulted. This includes proper citation of AI-generated sources, whether they be images, examples, or even drafts, outlines, or ideas derived from AI tools. The Laurier Library has created a guide to citing generative AI for students.

The strategies below are starting points only and instructors may adapt these suggestions to best suit individual teaching contexts, specific courses, and disciplines.

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Mitigating Unauthorized Use of Generative AI

• Administer assessments (tests, quizzes) in person, which may involve flipping your classroom to require students read or watch recordings outside class hours and complete activities and assessments in-class. Consider instituting course policies such as students must earn an overall passing grade on the in-person course assessments to pass the course.

• Engage students in class-based activities including critical discussions, problem-solving activities, polls, and group work requiring real-time thinking and application of concepts.

• Incorporate oral components of larger written assessments for students to demonstrate learning and expand or clarify their work during in-person or virtual meetings.

• Require students to show all work, submit drafts with tracked changes, annotations, outlines, or use collaborative tools (e.g., google docs) for transparency.

• Incorporate scaffolded assessments where tasks build on each other, promoting iterative learning, and providing guidance and feedback throughout the learning process.

• Consider asking for screenshots of library searches or databases to verify research strategies.

• Require students to incorporate course-specific or student-generated content (presentations, discussion posts, activities, slides, lecture materials) into group work, projects, tests, and other assessments.

• Encourage students to make connections between information sources, course materials, and their own contributions.

• Incorporate assignments where students connect current local or regional issues, personal experiences, or reflections to course concepts or course texts. 

• Build in metacognitive elements, prompting students to reflect on their learning and analyze their thinking processes (e.g., Why do you think x? What have you learned? How did you arrive at x?).

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Ways Laurier Colleagues Are Engaging with Generative AI

• Watch: Potential Uses for Generative AI in Teaching with Brandon Mattalo - Consider the opportunities for using generative AI to enhance pedagogical practices including contributing to assessment and rubric design, creating personalized learning experiences for students to get help and study effectively, and streamlining administrative tasks. Explore the ideas and tips in the video resource.

• Watch: Assessment Snapshot: Encouraging Critical Reflections on AI featuring Alanna Harman: Alanna Harman from Laurier's Kinesiology and Physical Education department shares the design, implementation, and outcome of her assessment involving student critiques of ChatGPT outputs. Learn about how innovative assessment design can encourage students to think critically about the role of generative AI in writing and analyzing concepts. 

• Watch: Academic Integrity and Generative AI: A Three-Pronged Approach featuring Lisa Kuron: Lisa Kuron discusses how fostering a climate of trust and respect, encouraging self-reliance, and adapting assessment designs to reflect critical thinking and personal engagement can mitigate some of the challenges posed by generative AI. She highlights the importance of teaching about the limitations of AI, using generative AI as an educational tool to demonstrate its biases and limitations, and encouraging students to rely more on their knowledge and skills.

• Watch: Tarah Brookfield sharing examples from her courses; including iterative ways of engaging with generative AI alongside students throughout a course, and how students have leveraged generative AI to bring creative assessments to life. 

• Watch: Richelle Monaghan sharing examples from her courses; including working with students to identify shortcomings and biases in generative AI. 

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Sharing Ideas

The Teaching Excellence and Innovation team value instructors’ perspectives and insights on the use of generative AI tools in the classroom. To continue to foster conversations across our campuses about generative AI tools likes ChatGPT, we would love to hear from you.

If you are interested, we invite you to share your suggestions, experiences, and feedback with us directly via email wluteaching@wlu.ca.

When you reach out, consider some of the following questions: 

• What tools have you used? 

• Have you leveraged generative AI tools in teaching activities? 

• Have you modified assessments to respond to generative AI? 

• Are there additional resources or supports you provide to students to help them understand appropriate use of generative AI? 

The Teaching Excellence and Innovation team are excited to follow up with you to learn more as you’re willing to share. Further community connection opportunities for Laurier instructors will be announced on Connect. 

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