Co-Designing AI Use Guidelines with Students

Here at CETLOE, we’ve partnered with many amazing faculty seeking to more fully collaborate with their students. Often, this looks like working together on research projects over time or co-teaching a course. However, when it comes to current students taking a course, this collaboration can get a little tricker. So, what can you do as a faculty member that cares? One lower-effort, higher-payoff idea is to co-design one small part of your course at the start of the teaching semester. This is exactly what Dr. Janel Paulk and her students did in Spring 2025 when they developed AI use guidelines together in CIS 3001: Managing IT Projects.

As a new part-time instructor, Janel began to wonder how to better integrate AI into the course, since AI has been more and more integrated into project management over the past decade; however, students have not necessarily been prepared to integrate AI into their own practice as burgeoning project managers. This means that the expectations and guidelines for utilizing AI in coursework have often been unclear or undefined for many students. With these thoughts in mind, Janel attended CETLOE’s AiTL: AI in Teaching and Learning Series. She decided to put an idea into practice from this series: Allow students to use AI in the course, much as they would in their actual careers. To facilitate this goal, Janel decided to co-create AI usage guidelines with her students.

Below, you’ll see the guidelines that Janel and the students created:

Class Memorandum of Understanding Artificial Intelligence Course Usage Guidelines

In the next section, we’ll briefly explain the process that they used to get there so that you can try it out yourself.

1. Foster an open and comfortable environment:  On the first day of class, Janel made sure to create a comfortable space where students felt free to talk openly. One way that she did this was with a simple full-group Icebreaker: How do you feel about this class or this semester? As students talked about their hopes, fears, excitements, and uncertainties, this helped create an atmosphere of sharing.
2. Host an open and democratic discussion: After sharing feelings and general expectations, Janel and the class moved through some first-day syllabus activities and then discussed AI use guidelines. This discussion revolved around two basic questions:
   1. When is it acceptable to use generative AI?
   2. When is it NOT acceptable to use generative AI?

   This discussion resulted in significant student-created scenarios for acceptable and unacceptable use.

3. Incorporate student feedback: After class, Janel reviewed her notes and developed the use guidelines, editing the student suggestions and her own expectations together into one cohesive document. She returned this document to the students during the next class and everyone agreed to adhere to these standards, including Janel. In this way, Janel helped foster a community approach to rules-making instead of a punitive, top-down approach.
4. Implement and reflect: Although the course is still ongoing, the guidelines are in place and Janel has begun to gather feedback on their success. One way that she did this recently was by co-hosting a reflective interview with several of her students and CETLOE. We look forward to hearing more about how the guidelines worked as the semester winds up!

So how did this process feel for the students? Let’s hear from the students themselves:

Comforting & Safe: According to Collin, “The process was extremely comforting [since] in other classes we don't have parameters or it's not even acknowledged. It's more like a secret thing between all of our professors because we know that everyone's using AI, but with professor Paulk…it's an open space”. Aakash agreed with Collin, “I would also say comforting. I think AI is pretty important right now since we might be using it in our jobs…and Dr. Paulk making it open to us and letting us know, hey, it's a safe space to use this in some scenarios to learn and to help us. I think that's really comforting. I hope that other classes can be open to that and other professors be open to the idea of that as well.”

Open & More Equal: Nava importantly pointed out that co-creating the AI MOU helped flatten some of the power difference between Janel and the students. She indicated that this experience helped her feel invited into the conversation and the co-creation: “There's not that secret line between the professors and the students, but there's this kind of open conversation. If I need something or if I wanna talk to my professor about this, I can be comfortable about it and not be  scared about it”. Aleena reflected Nava’s thoughts:, “I was quite surprised with how encouraging Dr. Paulk was with us using AI for her class…she is the first and only teacher I have had that has said to, and encouraged us, to use AI. I'm really glad that we had that first day to really set…the parameters because it is such a new thing for faculty, for students, that it is important to..understand where we draw the line between the teacher and the students”. Like Nava and Aleena, Abhinav felt less like a student being told what to do and more like a colleague being invited in: "She talked to us…like a friendly conversation…”.

How did the process feel for the professor? Janel echoed the sentiment of her students that creating the MOU led to a more comfortable learning environment in general: “I have been pleased to see that students have annotated ChatGPT or Cloud AI or Perplexity or whatever tool that they utilize in coming up with discussion…and so that was very reassuring that they were comfortable enough to note it as a footnote.” She also reflected that following the guidelines of the MOU herself reinforced that feeling of openness and safety for her students “so they could see that not only were they comfortable in utilizing that type of a framework, but that as the professor, I was also utilizing it.”

Research has shown that student-faculty collaboration in course design enhances the educational process for all involved. By involving students in the process of course creation and expectations–even in a small way–students have exhibited increased ownership in the learning process, leading to enhanced motivation and performance.

Think about ways that you can explore collaboration with your students in order to harness valuable perspectives, foster engagement, and create more dynamic learning experiences. If you’d like to read more about faculty and students creating AI policies together, Christine Martorana at Florida International University is doing great work in this area.

Not sure where to start? It’s okay to start small! CETLOE is available to you as a resource in thinking about new and exciting ways that you can collaborate with your students.