by Ethan Mollick and Lilach Mollick
September 25, 2023
Generative AI tools and the large language models (LLMs) they’re built on create exciting opportunities and pose enormous challenges for teaching and learning. After all, AI can now be ubiquitous in the classroom; every student and educator with a computer and internet has free access to the most powerful AI models in the world. And, like any tool, AI offers both new capabilities and new risks.
To help you explore some of the ways students can use this disruptive new technology to improve their learning—while making your job easier and more effective—we’ve written a series of articles that examine the following student use cases:
For each of these roles, we offer practical recommendations—and a detailed, shareable prompt—for how exactly you can guide students in wielding AI to achieve these ends.
But before you assign or encourage students to use AI, it’s important to first establish some guidelines around properly using these tools. That way, there’s less ambiguity about what students can expect from the AI, from “hallucinations” to privacy concerns.
Since these guidelines can be used generally—and across all four use cases we propose in this series—we wanted to share them in this introductory article. These are the same guidelines we provide our own students; feel free to use or adapt them for your class.