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Teaching with Generative Artificial Intelligence

The Balancing Act 

A robot dog from the College of Emerging and Collaborative Studies waves to students walking down Ped Walkway during the first day of Fall semester classes on August 19, 2024Our students need critical literacies for complex digital technologies like GenAI, and therefore do faculty and graduate students who teach. In an era where innovations and marketing continue to advance, the best approach is a balanced one: instructors will need to engage with GenAI while also helping students develop critical thinking about these tools.

Engage with GenAI

  • Everyone needs to understand and engage with GenAI
  • We need AL-aware teaching practices. We are all teaching in the age of GenAI, so we will need to adapt how we teach as students encounter this technology in their daily lives. 
  • GenAI is here to stay. It is already being integrated into the computer systems we use daily.
  • Employers expect students to know how and when to deploy GenAI, so students may feel they need these skills to survive on the job market (Mowreader, 2024).  
  • New GenAI products appear almost daily, with increasing capabilities.  
  • You should assume that GenAI software can do anything you might assign your students.  That means we all need to update how we teach (Cardona et al., 2023; Byrd et al., 2023) 
  • GenAI software may provide useful support for learning (Hutson et al., 2024)

Critique GenAI

  • Everyone needs to develop critical literacies for GenAI
  • We need critical literacy. GenAI software is created by human beings and deployed and marketed for financial gain. We need to question not only GenAI-created content, but also the software itself.  
  • As a human creation, GenAI is not “inevitable.”  Our students will influence what forms it takes in the future.
  • Discourse about GenAI innovation—including ideas about survival—is often troublingly similar to discourse supporting eugenics (Gebru & Torres, 2024).  
  • The core GenAI innovation, large language models (LLM), were created in ethically dubious ways (Metz, 2024). 
  • Widespread GenAI use, even at the level of ideas and dialogue, may result in more homogenous products (Doshi & Hauser, 2024).   
  • GenAI software may supplant both learning processes (Darvishi et al., 2024) and human contact (Crawford et al., 2024).  

Resources & Events

TLI is here to support you, wherever you are on your GenAI journey.  Below you’ll find links to resources based on your interests: 

  • I have doubts (and so do my students).  This page offers conversation starters to help you and your students discuss macro-level ethical issues related to GenAI, including environmental concerns.  This material can help you decide how or whether you want to integrate GenAI into your teaching. For your students, this material can help them feel comfortable discussing GenAI and its impact, so they can make informed decisions about using it (or not).
  • I just want to try something out.  This page offers tips to help you “start small” in integrating GenAI into your teaching and learning.  It includes tips for creating brief activities for yourself and your students.
  • I’m ready to update, revise, and redesign.  This page offers frameworks and suggestions for thinking about how best to create “AI aware” assessments, and about how to incorporate GenAI more thoroughly in your course design.

For resources on GenAI created by other UT offices, visit the Teach with GenAI at UTK hub page.

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