AI POLICY
ELEMENTARY EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
As part of our commitment to fostering a dynamic learning environment, the Elementary Education Department acknowledges the potential benefits and drawbacks of incorporating generative AI tools with course assignments and acknowledges that we may hold different personal and professional views on AI in education. By submitting assignments using an AI-content generator such as ChatGPT, students pledge to affirm that the work is their own and to attribute the use of any tools and sources. We expect all students to use AI tools ethically and responsibly and adhere to CSUN’s academic dishonesty policy.
To use AI responsibly and ethically, students should be aware of the limits of conversational, generative AI tools; the quality of the output directly correlates to the quality of the input. Therefore, students should master "prompt engineering" by refining their prompts to get good outcomes. All AI outputs should be fact-checked, and students should assume they are wrong unless they cross-check the claims with reliable sources. Students will be responsible for any errors or omissions.
Full disclosure of AI tool use is necessary, and failure to do so is in violation not just of academic integrity policies, but of the EED learning community, as well. At the end of the assignment, students must write a short paragraph to explain which AI tool they used and how they used it, including the prompts used to get the results. The following are approved uses of AI in this course:
- Brainstorming and fine-tuning ideas; using AI to draft an outline to clarify thoughts
- Checking grammar, rigor, and style; helping to find expressions.
**Note: The above text was written with the assistance of ChatGPT. The EED Dept faculty provided two examples of publicly sourced classroom policies around the use of AI that were in line with our own beliefs and then gave ChatGPT this prompt: Please revise and combine these policies on the use of generative artificial intelligence tools. We then revised the ChatGPT generated policy further, beginning with the opening line and deleting some sections that did not fit our expectations for your learning opportunities as an EED student.