Center for Teaching and Learning

How to Engage with chatGPT in your Course

CTL’s Preliminary, Evolving Guidelines for Considering How to Use chatGPT in Your Course (last updated Feb 8, 2023)

When considering how to engage with chatGPT in your course:

A. Rather than trying to avoid chatGPT, think how these tools allow us to achieve our intended course outcomes differently. 

  • Engage your students in conversations about the fundamental questions AI is forcing us to ask. How do they see the role of AI in their education? What ethical issues are raised by the use of AI?
  • Tell your students that they must vet and validate any work produced by it as it can produce “plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical” output. It can be a good tool for initial brainstorming, but its outputs require rigorous evaluation.
  • Ask your students to compare different texts written by machines and human authors and to distinguish the AI-generated texts from those written by people. Invite the students to dissect the AI-generated texts: what gave them away? what features fooled them into believing the text had a human author?
B. Incorporate AI into a drafting process. Ask your students to use chatGPT to generate a first draft of a thesis question or research proposal and then ask students to edit it.
C. If you can envision experts and scholars in your field using chatGPT, then consider building those authentic skills into your assignments.
D. Consider assignments that teach students to “coach” AI to generate quality writing or evaluate the quality of AI-generated writing.
E. Try using AI as a review partner. One can ask students to submit sentences and questions to chatGPT early in the writing process and ask chatGPT for feedback.