Using Generative AI to Support Your Teaching Practice

How can you be using Generative AI to Support your Teaching Practice?

In all the talk about Generative AI and student use, it can be easy to overlook that Generative AI has plenty of uses for faculty themselves: many of which will assist you by saving time in your preparation.

Before using Generative AI to support your Teaching Practice, it is recommended you have a basic understanding of how Generative AI works and what some of the limitations of Generative AI are. Many of these are outlined in the Introduction to the section on Activities to Understand Generative AI at the start of this book, and some additional faculty focused resources are included in the NSCC Resources textbox at the bottom of this page.

This section includes some different ideas on ways you can use Generative AI in your Teaching Practice. Many of these fall in the category of creating in-class activities. Rather than make this a generic suggestion, we have tried to give ideas around specific activities you could develop. Not all of these will work for every topic, but we hope you will find something here to assist you.

What about Generative AI and Academic Integrity?

All staff and students at NSCC are expected to uphold the principles of Academic Integrity. Presenting information that was created by Generative AI as your own, could be considered an act of Academic Dishonestly.  Just as we would expect our students to disclose use of Generative AI in an assignment, faculty should do the same. Depending on the context this may need an APA citation or an acknowledgement.

An acknowledgement should include an indication of what product was used, a link to that product and a brief description of how it was used., eg. “created with  Microsoft Copilot  which was used to brainstorm a structure and revise the writing in the final product”.

What about Generative AI and Evaluation?

One thing you won’t find in this book is the suggestion that you use Generative AI for student evaluation. There are two main reasons for this:

• Intellectual Property: Many Generative AI programs continue to build and refine their language models with the prompts and information that are input into them. Though it is tempting to think of using Generative AI to assist with evaluating student responses, to input student work into the Generative AI program to do so could violate the student’s Intellectual Property (and potentially the terms of use of the Generative AI product, which may include that you hold the Copyright to anything you input). Inputting student papers into a Generative AI program to get feedback could additionally be considered a violation of NSCC’s Academic Integrity Policy.
• Student Trust: We expect students to be authentic in their assignment work, it is fair to assume that they similarly expect that their instructors will be authentic in their evaluation of this work. Using a Generative AI product to review and/or create feedback for your students is a violation of this expectation.