Communicating AI Expectations with Students
How Should I Communicate with my Students About AI Use ?
Whether you ban, allow, or promote AI use in your classes, it is essential to communicate with your students about AI use in your course: If and when it is appropriate, how they may use it (if allowed), and why these decisions have been made. For clear communication, it is also essential that this information is communicated regularly in multiple ways.
Developing Course AI Expectations
Discussing AI Use with Students
Building and Sharing AI Expectations for your Course
These are some considerations for developing and examples of statements for sharing AI expectations.
Examples of Course Outline AI Statements
Multiple examples of statements used at ULethbridge, divided into categories of allowed AI use (not allowed, allowed)
These are provided by ULethbridge academic staff, and can be copied and modified as needed.
Faculty of Fine Arts Sample Syllabi Statement
(Thank you to the FFA for sharing this sample statement.)
Documentation of Generative AI Tool Usage
Dr. Aaron Taylor
Some useful external resources on writing and sharing AI expectation:
Syllabi Policies for AI-Generative Tools
Lance Eaton created this resource to share and help other instructors see the range of policies available by other educators to help develop their own for navigating AI-generative tools.
The Teaching Centre recommends that you set aside time to discuss your perspectives, philosophy, and course policy on the uses of AI in your course(s) with your students.
AI has been imposed on education and in everyone's life in an unprecedented way, and as we try to catch up, one thing is clear: our students need discipline tailored education with multiple perspectives to understand the impacts, ethics and basics of how it works if they are going to make critically reasoned choices around AI use. As educators in this environment, the scale and rapid evolution of AI's impact have left us in a spot where we have no choice but to incorporate AI education in our courses and contextualize it for our students. As is reflected in this KPMG survey students are asking for this education.
The library has created an AI Literacy: Generative AI course open to anyone at the University as an introduction to generative AI. It is aimed primarily at students (it goes on their MyExperience transcript upon completion) but is a great place to begin, refresh or extend your AI understanding to support those conversations!
A great resource for understanding, framing and discussing AI with your students:
The discussion questions from this guide: a starting point when discussing AI with your students:
Note: both these resources are Copyright © 2026 Med Kharbach, PhD under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. No alterations to the original have been made.
- Repetition - Repetition is one of the most basic and well researched forms of learning. it builds retention, strengthens neural connections, supports mastery, and builds confidence in understanding or skill. You are teaching students, often for the first time if, when and how to use AI. It is very important to repeat your philosophy and expectations in multiple ways (course outline, discussion, on assessments) so they can process theses over time and in multiple relevant contexts.
- Modelling including explicit thinking/practice - It is always important for instructors to incorporate course policies/guidelines, philosophies etc, into their own practice so their actions and expectations are aligned and obvious to students. An important extension to this is the use of explicit thinking/practice, in which you not only follow guidelines/practices yourself, but also verbalize where, when, and why. Share your decision making around AI to model the process for your students.
Example: Images in a slide deck - discussion points- If you used ai to create images, ensure that is cited in the deck. Discuss your choice, ai that you used, and why. (e.g. This image was made with Google Gemini. I could not find an image that illustrated this concept in this context, so I decided to make one with AI.)
- If you did not use ai, it is a great opportunity to discuss why (e.g. "I could have made this easily with AI. We have agreeed AI is not allowed in this course, and the resources required to make the image was not justified, so I found an existing open source image on the web and referenced that.")
References:
Hintzman, Douglas L. Repetition and Memory The Psychology of Learning and Motivation., vol. 10, Academic Press, 1976, pp. 47–91
https://portico.inflexion.org/wp-content/uploads/metacognition-policy-paper.pdf