The University’s proposed Responsible Adoption of Artificial Intelligence Tools for Teaching and Learning is open for feedback online for the upcoming academic year, but submissions before July 31 will be given priority.
The framework was announced May 6, proposing guidelines for both professors and students on how to responsibly use AI in the classroom. The working group, which researched and wrote the guidelines for the framework, is accepting comments and responses before finalizing the guidelines in the fall semester.
“The hope was that we could create guiding principles for people when they are actually evaluating tools for use and their teaching,” said Kasey Ford, AI designer at the Office of Academic Technology. “The hope is that we will be able to build off of this to disseminate things like guides and reports that people can go to to look for tools that will solve certain problems for them but also still fall within this responsible framework.”
The guidelines were made after six months of research and consultation with AI experts and professors across campus. The framework contains eight guiding principles for AI use, including intention, stewardship and relationships.
“The principle that resonated the most with (an AI group) was relationships,” Ford said. “Often when you are reading about data governance or how to integrate AI into education, people do not talk about the social and relational aspects of using these tools and making sure that even though we might be using AI for all kinds of things, that we are still focusing on relationships between peers, faculty and students and students in the broader campus community.”
AI professors on campus expressed support for these guidelines, saying they do not hinder AI use while providing reasonable and positive direction for both students and professors.
“It is actually very good that the University is being clear and direct about what are the responsible ways (in which AI can be used) are,” said Peter Stone, director of Texas Robotics. “There’s still a lot of uncertainty, both on the side of faculty and on the side of students, on what’s the right way, pedagogically, to use these tools.”
Sharon Strover, a journalism professor who helped write the guidelines, said she would like to implement AI examples students might encounter into the framework in the future to provide further direction.
“This document would be really useful if we both offered some examples and solicited more so that we could have a pooled (sandbox) where people could say, ‘This is how I’m using it, and here are the strengths, here are the weaknesses,” Strover said.
Although the open comment period prioritization ends on July 31 for changes to be implemented in the fall, the University plans to continue accepting suggestions and allow for open comment periods to improve the proposed framework every six months.
“We are very aware that this is a quickly evolving kind of state of affairs in higher education, with higher education and AI,” Ford said. “We started with the idea that this might be around generative AI, but we just started to broaden the framework to all kinds of AI technologies because there are constantly new innovations happening.”
