Teaching with Generative AI

These guidelines come from BCIT's Official Position Statement on GenAI:

1. Ethical and Responsible Use: You consider the ethical and responsible use of these tools. Be aware that under BCIT Policy 5900 and Policy 6700, it is not permitted to ask students to create individual accounts with GenAI companies. Not only do these companies collect personal information, but they may be storing it outside of Canada. If you require your students to set up individual accounts, you must complete a full privacy impact assessment.
2. Clear Communication of Guidelines: You are transparent in communicating the boundaries of the use of GenAI tools in your academic activities. Students need to know what tools they are allowed to use and under what conditions so they may uphold our values and commitment to academic integrity as laid out in Policy 5104. This includes guiding students on how to properly acknowledge GenAI-generated content in their work, and clarifying that the unauthorized use of these tools in assignments may be considered a violation of BCIT’s Student Code of Academic Integrity - Policy 5104
3. Inclusivity and Accessibility: You strive to consider ‘who is in the room’ and to create an inclusive and accessible environment for diverse needs and backgrounds. This includes ensuring equitable access to GenAI resources and tools and that all students have the necessary training and support to use these technologies effectively.
4. Adaptability and Continuous Learning: You stay informed, curious, and open-minded as the technology evolves at a rate we haven’t had to contend with before. Continue to adapt your approach as new information and ethical guidelines emerge.

BCIT believes that this decision is aligned with our desire to empower our faculty and create a space for innovation in teaching and learning. Please continue to explore this guide and refer to the "An Introduction to GenAI Tools" introductory resource,

If you have any questions or require further guidance, please contact:

• Your Learning & Teaching Centre School Liaison
• Information Access & Privacy Support: Information Access and Privacy Office
• Academic Integrity Support: Student Life Office

Clearly communicating with your students what is, and what is not, permitted with regard to Generative AI is important. Students want to know when an assignment should be solely their own work and when it is permitted to engage with a generative AI tool.

To help you get started I have gathered some example paragraphs you could adapt for your context and use in a syllabus or assignment. Listed from restrictive to permissive:

• This course policy is designed to promote your learning and intellectual development and to help you reach course learning outcomes. The use of generative artificial intelligence tools or apps for assignments in this course, including tools like ChatGPT and other AI writing or coding assistants, is prohibited.
• The use of generative artificial intelligence tools and apps is strictly prohibited in all course assignments unless explicitly stated otherwise by the instructor in this course. This includes ChatGPT and other AI writing and coding assistants. Use of generative AI in this course may be considered use of an unauthorized aid, which is a form of cheating.
• Students may use artificial intelligence tools for creating an outline for an assignment, but the final submitted assignment must be original work produced by the individual student alone.
• Students may not use artificial intelligence tools for taking tests, writing research papers, creating computer code, or completing major course assignments. However, these tools may be useful when gathering information from across sources and assimilating it for understanding.
• Students may choose to use generative artificial intelligence tools as they work through the assignments in this course; this use must be documented in an appendix for each assignment. The documentation should include what tool(s) were used, how they were used, and how the results from the AI were incorporated into the submitted work.
• Course instructors reserve the right to ask students to explain their process for creating their assignment.
• If you use Generative AI to get ideas and/or partial answers for an assignment and/or to generate any text for a draft or final version of any part of an assignment, you must declare which tool you used and cite it. Additionally include a short paragraph with your assignment describing the extent to which it was used. You must save any and all generated text from this tool in case it is requested. Failure to declare will be considered plagiarism.
• Any content produced by an artificial intelligence tool must be cited appropriately.
• Students must submit, as an appendix with their assignments, any content produced by an artificial intelligence tool, and the prompt used to generate the content.
• Students may use artificial intelligence tools, including generative AI, in this course as learning aids or to help produce assignments. However, students are ultimately accountable for the work they submit.

Acknowledgements: This resource has been adapted from a document retrieved from the Office of the Vice-Provost, University of Toronto. 

Further resources

Syllabi Policies for Generative Tools: A crowd-sourced collection of syllabi policies about generative AI.

Can I identify if students have used Generative AI to do their work?

No. "AI Detection" tools to detect whether something was written by GenAI are not reliable, exhibit bias – falsely identifying original content based on writing patterns – and can not provide ways to intuitively double-check whether they have correctly flagged generated content. AI Detectors have an unacceptably high rate of false positives, which cause harm to students. They make decisions about students that cannot be verified by a human.

In 2023, BCIT's Educational Technology and Learning Design Committee voted to discontinue the AI detection functionality in Turnitin. There is no approved AI Detection tool at BCIT and they should not be used.

No AI Detection tool (such as GPTZero, Copyleaks, and ZeroGPT) has been evaluated for compliance with BCIT policies. Uploading student personal information to an unvetted service may be a breach of British Columbia's Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. Additionally, it may be a violation of the Copyright Act as students own copyright of their work.

There are some tells for simplistic responses coming out of ChatGPT. For instance, the feel of the response may be more formal, or too generic, and ChatGPT is not good at referencing real sources of information. However, those are not reliable measures for suspecting misconduct, and LLM-created content can be edited to obfuscate those.

Excerpted from The University of British Columbia under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

Teaching with Generative AI LibGuide by BCIT Library Services is licensed CC BY-NC, meaning it can be used for non-commercial purposes if attribution is provided. Learn more about Creative Commons licenses on the BCIT Open Education LibGuide.

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