Spring 2025: Generative AI in CMCI: Contextual Empowerment Over Policy Mandates

Summary:

DTAC recommends a flexible, faculty-driven approach to generative AI in CMCI, emphasizing support, shared learning, and discipline-specific guidance rather than college-wide mandates.

Narrative:

Faculty in CMCI express a broad consensus that the use of generative AI is highly contextual and discipline-specific, often varying between departments and within a single instructor's courses. While the risks and benefits of AI are widely acknowledged, a policy-driven or legislative approach at the college level is viewed as unfeasible and unnecessary.

Instead, CMCI should concentrate on building capacity by providing resources, fostering shared learning, and ensuring that all instructors, including new ones and GPTIs, can make informed, high-context decisions regarding AI use in their teaching.

There is strong support for encouraging every instructor and department to acknowledge AI in their syllabus with a clear class-specific policy—whether restrictive, permissive, or somewhere in between—and for providing flexible templates or frameworks to facilitate this process.

 

Revised Recommendations to the Dean for CMCI (Enablement-Oriented)

  1. Avoid implementing blanket AI policies. Allow ethical and pedagogical decisions regarding AI usage to rest with individual instructors and departments, where the disciplinary and curricular context can inform meaningful choices.
  2. Encourage faculty to include an AI policy in every syllabus. This promotes transparency, sets student expectations, and supports accountability. A policy might take the form of a scale indicating permitted AI use—from "no AI" to "co-creation"—adjustable by assignment.
  3. Develop and share flexible AI syllabus templates. Offer optional language for instructors to use or adapt, which is especially helpful for newer instructors or those less familiar with emerging AI norms.
  4. Offer peer-learning workshops and forums. Support faculty and staff by providing opportunities to explore AI platforms, ethical implications, and discipline-specific applications through workshops and peer-led sessions.
  5. Regardless of major or department, we should work to equip students with critical AI literacy. We should encourage departments to include AI ethics, authorship, and accountability in relevant coursework, so students understand when and how to use AI tools responsibly, both in school and in professional environments.
  6. Promote campus-level resources and initiatives. Ensure instructors are aware of resources such as the campus LLM Gateway initiative and assist them in incorporating CU Boulder-wide materials into their teaching (e.g., for syllabus statements).
  7. Support course supervisors in establishing standards for multi-section classes. When multiple instructors teach the same course or share assignments, course supervisors should assist in coordinating how AI use is addressed to prevent confusion or inequity.
  8. Create a resource hub for ongoing conversations. Maintain a space (e.g., a webpage or Canvas module) where CMCI instructors can access shared resources, sample policies, platform guides, and updates about campus-wide AI developments.
  9. Establish a regular review process. Revisit AI-related guidance, resources, and practices each academic year to ensure alignment with evolving technologies, student needs, and pedagogical innovations.

Guiding Principles and Prohibitions

  1. Do not centralize or mandate AI policy at the college level. A top-down mandate may stifle pedagogical diversity and fail to address nuanced use cases.
  2. Do not assume faculty need awareness of "the risks" without support in addressing them. Shift from risk alarm to contextual empowerment.
  3. Avoid portraying CMCI's AI experience as uniquely distinct. Our experience reflects broader national trends; what matters is how we adapt in meaningful, department-specific ways.

 

DTAC department representatives, AY24-25

Nathan Schneider/MDST

Joseph Labrecque/APRD

Pat Clark/DCMP

Christy Dale Maurer/COMM

Ross Taylor/JRNL

Brian Keegan/INFO

Committee Facilitator:

Steve Silva/Director of Technology Experience