Navigating AI as an administrator in higher ed

Some basic principles and people to consider

As a Writing Program Administrator who also does research at the intersection of computation and writing, I’ve been thinking a lot about how WPAs and other admins can approach AI writing in the fall. It’s going to look different for every institution, but I think there are a few principles and constituencies that every admin can consider. I offer a summary below. You can also see the 9min video version of these points in a talk I gave at Computers and Writing in June 2023, or the full slide deck from a parallel presentation at the MLA MAPS Institute: https://bit.ly/VeeMLAMAPS .

Let me know if you have other ideas based on your experience as an admin!

Some basic principles to consider as an admin navigating AI:

Collaborate with colleagues

• Include admin, faculty, teaching and learning professionals, Writing Center colleagues, libraries, computer science faculty, etc. 

• Pay attention to developments in AI technology

• Consider the writing and learning goals of your campus and program

Center people in the use of AI (see the US Office of Ed Tech report)

• Advocate for smaller classes and faculty support

• Encourage staged assignments and faculty conversation with students

• Keep faculty autonomy as strong as possible

Communicate to and with admin, faculty, and students

• Listen to students about their goals and practices and questions

• Provide clear AI policies for students

• Let admin and colleagues know what your programs do

The three key constituents WPAs need to consider are: their Upper Admin, Faculty, and Students. For upper admin, it’s crucial to make a case for your programs by gathering and communicating data and stories about what you do; address concerns about academic integrity; discourage technological fixes that they’re likely to be sold; and advocate for faculty and students. For faculty, a WPA needs to collaborate across campus; encourage clear policies regarding AI; provide guidance in revising assignments that are highly exposed to AI; and reassure them that many of the approaches they’ve used for addressing plagiarism still work. For students, a WPA needs to listen, especially to multiple different kinds of students at the institution, and they need to provide clear policies and guidance on how AI can be used in courses.

For AI use policy, check out what your university already has first: many academic integrity policies already cover much of what needs to be said in terms of AI academic integrity issues. But more guidance should be provided about kinds of use and acknowledgement of AI. Below is a draft of a policy I wrote up for Pitt Composition faculty to consider adopting.

The use of generative AI writing tools (such as ChatGPT, GrammarlyGO, GPT-3, GPT-4, BERT, or others) is allowed in this class within specific contexts and only if such use is properly acknowledged. Assignments for the course have been designed to help you develop as a writer, and some of them may call on you to practice writing with the help of such tools. As your instructor, I will assume that any use of these tools will be only within the contexts the assignment allows (for instance, you can use ChatGPT for brainstorming if the assignment asks you to do so). You must acknowledge the use of AI in your assignment in an "Acknowledgement of AI Use" statement that: 

·         Specifies which technology was used and on what date (ChatGPT, GPT-3, etc)

·         Includes explicit descriptions of how the information was generated

·         Identifies the prompts used

·         Explains how the output was used in your work

Examples of such Acknowledgments of AI Use can be found on Monash University's website. The use of AI outside of contexts where the instructor specifies its use, or failure to acknowledge any use of AI technologies in your work will be considered an academic integrity violation and addressed according to Pitt’s Academic Integrity policies: https://www.as.pitt.edu/faculty/policies-and-procedures/academic-integrity-code  . You are the author of your work for the course and authorship means you take responsibility for your words and claims, regardless of which tools you use. Please see me if you have any questions about this policy. 

This policy is also available here, along with another sample policy that prohibits all use of AI in a writing course: https://www.writinginstitute.pitt.edu/teaching/ai-and-teaching-writing.

Good luck and please share any ideas you have, too!

Video

Transcript of video

Hi, everyone! Thanks so much for letting me zoom in for this. I'm really excited to be part of this panel.

I'm Annette Vee. I'm an associate professor of English and director of composition at University of Pittsburgh and I'm going to be talking about navigating AI writing as a WPA or writing program administrator because that's basically my day job. But I also do research at the intersection of computation and writing. I just want to give a shout out and thanks to Tim Laquintano who was part of the production of some of these slides and some of the ideas behind this.

So I'll just start out with basic principles for a writing program administrator and I'm not going to read through the slides here. I can share a link so that you can access all of this if you'd like but I have kind of three basic principles and it's about:

·      Collaboration

·      Centering people in the use of AI and

·      Communicating with people on your faculty

[Collaboration] So it's really important to do collaboration with lots of different groups as a WPA--that

includes students, faculty administrators, and people who teach writing—and including people in computer science. Also think about the learning goals of your campus and your program. That's really important to collaborate with people to consider those goals in relation to AI.

Centering people in the use of AI: Advocating for smaller classes and faculty support, I think is really important. Encouraging staged assignments, keeping faculty autonomy as strong as possible, I think is really key. I think there's a real strong threat of upper admin perhaps coming down and saying “this is the way that we should use AI; this is the way we shouldn't” and I think it's really important for faculty to be able to make those decisions independently.

Communication: So, listening to students about their goals and practices, providing clear AI policies for students and for faculty in your program and then letting admin and colleagues know what your programs do. I think that it's possible that we're going to be somewhat threatened by AI. You know, if AI is able to do the Writing Center’s work then that we already do, then maybe we should just get rid of the Writing Center! And that is something obviously none of us would want so I think it's really important for us to consider and communicate those kinds of things.

I'll break this down in terms of:

·      Working with your upper admin

·      Working with faculty and

·      Working with students

So, communicating what your writing program does: This is about gathering data, documenting syllabi, collecting student testimonies, highlight successful faculty approaches, and arguing for professional support. Using this kind of data is really isn't important. This is something that's really critical to a lot of writing program administration work but I think it's really crucial for AI in particular because of the kind of additional pressures that this may put on our programs talking about academic integrity.

Upper admin is very invested in this [academic integrity] so thinking about how that might be a way for you to get in talk about centering people in the AI approaches that you're advocating, discouraging technological solutions. You know, for instance, I know I've had faculty think well maybe you know once we get a good TurnItIn Plug-In or whatever then this problem will go away. But that's just not going to be true. But I do think it's important to emphasize that students generally are not interested in cheating. In the surveys that I've given to students, this seems pretty clear, at least at Pitt, and I think that's generally you know something that we advocate for in computers and writing, too, right? As in, I'm taking students seriously and taking them at their word--all of these things are really important for thinking about working with your upper admin.

And then consider suggesting to your upper admin about maybe revising University level academic honesty policies thinking about potential AI literacy programs about data literacy, ethics, things like that, arguing for faculty development, support for design of assignments that help students learn. I think that that's that's super important for WPAs and that's a role that we can do. And then including students in these conversations I think sometimes upper admin is so removed from students that they may not necessarily be thinking about including students, [and] this is a place of advocacy we can do as WPAs.

Working with faculty: Here's another constituency that's really important as a WPA talking with colleagues in computer science, figuring out what they're doing, collaborating with them is important. Learning from teaching and learning center professionals, librarians, etc, and connecting with teaching writing across the curriculum. This is this kind of collaboration is important, reaching out and having those conversations. When you're talking with your faculty, too, you want to think about how you know advocate for them to talk with students about what they're doing. Advocate that they need to be offering a clear policy on AI. They need to be thinking about how to revise their assignments, and teaching students how AI writing works, and then learning how to recognize AI writing and respond to it in an appropriate way--whatever that appropriate way is for your program. Encourage faculty to reconsider writing activities highly exposed to AI--so that may include summaries of texts or concepts, analysis of historical or prominent events, things like this. And you know a lot of these things are things that we already know, right? We don't want to do One-Shot assignments in writing but this is something that sometimes faculty are still doing so this is a kind of a good way in to advocate for changing some of those assignments.

You can also provide tips for revising the assignments so here's a few ideas: converting writing to talking, using human versus machine kind of contests, connecting writing to local contexts and increasing expectations for quality of thought. Especially if they will be using AI then you're kind of looking for something else when you're evaluating assignments. And then remember that assignments that resist AI assistants are similar to those that resist on other forms of academic dishonesty. So I think it can be really intimidating for faculty to, you know, think “oh no it's AI, it's all different! we have to do all new things!” But a lot of the same advice that we've given about how to resist academic dishonesty issues are you know kind of the same thing that we might do for AI, right? So that is writing that has kind of staged parts, writing on recent events, using original research, things that are relying on conversations in class, and things that students have a personal responsibility or meaningful connection to.

Working with students: This is the last kind of section that I'm going to talk bout. So the first thing is to listen to students, talk with different populations of students on your campus. Ao that includes, you know, students who are in all sorts of different classes: gen Eds, majors, students with disabilities, students coming from first gen backgrounds. What are the kind of students’ concerns and how they might be different? And learn about their career goals, connecting policies for students, and their [desired] trajectories. Assume that students want to learn and generally don't want to cut corners with AI writing--that's been my experience at least. Provide clear policies for students to navigate AI, read through academic integrity policies your University already has. Provide suggested policies. These are all really important things about working with students.

And then finally AI policy: I have a couple suggestions about AI policies, so for instance the first thing is to look at: your university, whatever [academic integrity] policy you already have. So this is my policy at University of Pittsburgh. You can find your policies you know somewhere on your websites I'm sure. And so this already kind of covers a lot of AI, but implicitly. And so I offer a suggested policy here. You could find the

suggested policy that I have at the Writing Institute at University of Pittsburgh website here for a workshop that I recently did with Tim Laquintano. Basically it's about acknowledging the use of AI in your assignment, and this is kind of the way that I would advocate doing.

So finally I have a few resources that I'd like to share with you, and you're welcome to check these out and then we'll have more discussion later.

Thank you so much!