We know our students need to think critically in an AI age to be productive and engaged future employees. One solution, writes Faculty Focus (July 9, 2025), to the triple challenge of fostering critical thinking, meaningful learning, and academic integrity is to double down on transparency. We can emphasize the why we want responsible AI use: why we want students to use their own cognitive abilities for some tasks, why using AI could be helpful at times, and why we’ve crafted AI-integrated assignments in the ways we have.
Here are five steps to update assignments in the AI age:
Step 1: Take a critical look at your current syllabus. If AI can easily complete a task (try running your instructions through ChatGPT to find out), maybe it’s no longer a relevant measure of authentic learning. Add new instructional practices (like modelling AI use) and new components of the assignments you update or keep.
Step 2: Consider whether and how students should use AI on the assignments. Students want to know exactly what is appropriate for AI use in your class. A helpful tool for this process is the 5-level AI Assessment Scale (AIAS). The levels range from No AI, AI Planning, AI Collaboration, Full AI, and AI Exploration. Each one identifies and sanctions different ways students can use AI in appropriate and meaningful ways to support their learning.
Step 3: Discuss and model your expectations. Students are not sure what is acceptable in this current moment. What better way to help them feel confident while developing the AI skills they need than modelling what you’re looking for? Take class time or record a video for your online class to teach your students what you expect them to do with AI for each assignment, what not to do, and what you’ll be looking for in their finished product.
Step 4: Ask students to disclose their AI use. One approach is to use the AI Disclosure (AID) framework to document how students used AI, or add an appendix to each assignment, or add comments or footnotes to make transparent what they wrote and what AI wrote.
Step 5: If you suspect inappropriate use of AI, don’t accuse students of cheating. Instead, have a conversation with them. A primary goal of the AIAS is to facilitate discussions about AI use.
As I pointed out in a recent blog, our author team can help. We have developed AI exercises for each chapter of the new 15th edition.
More recently I have begun to add a word cloud to my syllabus. A word cloud is a visual representation of the content of a document or web site. The size of the font of the words in the word cloud is proportional to the number of times the word appears in the document or web site. This enables viewers to very easily pick out the more important terms and concepts in the document.