Guidance on Appropriate Uses of AI
AI tools should support, not undermine, human expertise. Faculty and staff may use AI to improve efficiency, while students should ensure AI use aligns with academic integrity expectations. Examples of acceptable uses may include, but are not limited to:
- Teaching and lesson planning: Developing teaching materials & instructional resources, getting suggestions for learning objectives, teaching strategies, and assessment methods (rubrics), as well as generating quizzes/exams, discussion prompts, assessing/summarizing student comprehension.
- Reviewing publicly accessible data: AI can help you draft a review, analyze publicly accessible content (for example, proposals, papers and articles) to aid in drafting summaries, or pull together ideas. Content can be summarized or displayed in differing formats. To determine if data is considered public, refer to the data classifications guidelines.
- Streamlining administrative tasks: This might include tasks such as scheduling, reporting, event planning, or communication. Ensure any queries to generate correspondence contain only anonymized information and does not contain any institutional data.
- Enhancing student learning: AI can support students by creating study aids, outlining/drafting manuscript structure, brainstorming & narrowing research topics, enhancing comprehension through analogy, or improving writing skills through proofreading for voice & tone.
- Professional Development: Staff are encouraged to take part in AI literacy training to ensure that they understand ethical, secure, and effective uses of AI relevant to their roles, and supervisors should support that as part of professional development.
- Prohibition on Automating Decisions That Affect Employees: Staff prohibited from using AI to make decisions involving hiring, performance evaluations, or disciplinary actions. Those functions require human oversight to ensure fairness and compliance. That should also apply to student services and financial aid decisions.
Scenario-Based Examples
The purpose of the guide containing scenario-based examples is to help faculty, staff, and students navigate the responsible use of generative AI tools (such as ChatGPT, Grammarly, Copilot, and others) in academic and professional contexts: Scenario-Based AI Use Guide
