The use of artificial intelligence in the classroom has brought challenges to longstanding norms in university lectures, seminars and academic integrity. A core pillar of the learning approach at Brock University, the Centre for Pedagogical Innovation (CPI), has been working to provide Brock’s professors and teaching assistants with guidance on how to navigate these challenges.
The CPI website hosts an abundance of resources on a variety of topics, ranging from recommendations on how to design a course, managing classroom Brightspace pages and research conducted on learning practices.
In an interview with The Brock Press, Associate Director of Educational Development Natalie Patterson and Director of Teaching and Learning Giulia Forsythe took some time to discuss the challenges of A.I. in universities and the evolving role of academic integrity.
For students unfamiliar with the role of CPI here at Brock, Forsythe provided a brief history, stating that “in the early 1980s there was a committee of faculty that wanted to focus on improving teaching and supporting it.”
Forsythe explained that teaching represents about 40 per cent of the role of tenured faculty here at Brock, with another 40 per cent being allocated for research and a final 20 per cent for service at the time.
The committee was an offshoot of Senate and iwas known as the Instructional Development Committee. “They wanted to help make Brock a great place that was known for great teaching,” Forsythe said.
The Instructional Development Committee went on to produce several 3M teaching fellows, a national award for teaching within Canada. Brock has amongst the most 3M teaching fellows across all of Canada proportional to its size.
Forsythe stated that the committee then formed an office, and in the early 2000s, adopted a “learning management system to help facilitate things like sharing of a course syllabus online and possibly doing some online interactions.”
Around the time of web 2.0, the office expanded its support to include the possibilities that the digital age offered to advance education.
Forsythe explained that technology was just “one part of the portfolio at the centre for teaching and learning. […] We’re always supporting faculty in their course design, their assessment design, supporting their learning outcomes.”
To better understand the role of CPI, Forsythe explained that innovation is not limited to major technological discoveries, but that it can also look like “having meaningful conversations with people.”
The primary role of CPI is meeting the learning goals of individual courses, focusing on assessment design and supporting faculty in managing large class sizes to ensure that students are properly supported.
Forsythe explained that one of her proudest initiatives is the “open educational resources working group,” which works to “make expensive textbooks free and open.” Forsythe advised that “CPI works in partnership with BUSU to make sure that there are funds available for faculty, so that they can make that transition so that courses have these open textbooks.”
CPI was also involved in changing the course evaluation policy here at Brock. Forsythe noted that “at one point, it was possible for a class to have a 100 per cent evaluation as a final exam. Though it didn’t happen a whole lot, it was still possible as the policy did not say otherwise.”
In 2023, CPI helped to change this by assisting the move through policy, which stated that “there had to be at least three forms of assessment,” with new criteria outlining how classrooms should function, which can now be found in the faculty handbook.
Patterson added that academic integrity has recently been added to the portfolio of CPI with the current focus being on figuring out how to shift university culture to encourage students to avoid academic misconduct.
In discussing academic integrity and A.I. usage, Forsythe said that “at Brock, the responsibility for the class falls under the academic freedom of the instructor […] the intellectual property of the material belongs to the instructor, so as long as they are meeting the learning outcomes, they have a great deal of flexibility.” This creates “a large spectrum of ways in which people conduct their classes,” Forsythe said. “Just like any other tool we’ve used here at Brock, there are a lot of people who use [A.I.] and want to approach it very differently.”
Forsythe explained how “in first year psychology, which is over 1,500 students, they are using generative A.I. as a way of thinking about [A.I.’s] limitations and usage, so it’s actively involved in the learning process. [The learning process] is not being actively outsourced.”
In other places, Forsythe explained that “the process of writing and thinking independently is really important,” and faculty “don’t want to do that cognitive offloading, and so the recommendation is that there is no generative A.I.”
“We just really want to make sure that instructors are using whatever approach they’re using and that it’s thoughtful, it’s well-articulated and their rationale is shared with students, so that it’s known that the chosen approach was done for a particular reason with a goal of reaching particular learning outcomes,” said Forsythe.
Patterson directed faculty members interested in the spectrum of approaches to generative A.I. to check out CPI’s website, which includes guidance on A.I. usage.
CPI team members have been going to different departments and speaking with various faculty on the future of university assessments. “We’ve been trying to get a good sense of what people are doing in the classroom, how it’s going and the challenges that they’re facing,” said Forsythe.
According to Forsythe, “one of the biggest challenges [instructors] have is not really around generative A.I., but around engagement, so students showing up to class, being ready and prepare, being interested and attentive.”
CPI is currently looking for ways to improve “that experience for faculty and students because nobody wants to be in a room where nobody else wants to be there,” said Forsythe.
As for whether there is a role for A.I. in the classroom, Forsythe said that “there are some ethical implications with the uses of A.I., they are related to […] your cognitive load and the importance of actually doing your own thinking.”
“There’s some environmental factors and I do think that any technology that’s introduced for profit as opposed to public good has some huge implications and issues, and I do think we should be careful and cautious about our full scale adoption, but I have seen it do some very cool and interesting things so I wouldn’t discount it entirely. I just don’t think that I’m ready to jump entirely on the bandwagon,” said Forsythe.
For Forsythe, as long as individuals use A.I. “with full knowledge of the implications of its usage, I think it can be done in a really useful way, and it can be really helpful to kind of offload a lot of the mundane tasks.”
Forsythe mentioned citations as an example of these mundane tasks but mentioned that citations provide important knowledge on where sources come from. She went on to say that “if A.I. can help tell me how to do citation really quickly, maybe that’s a great use of it.”
Forsythe believes that there may be good uses for A.I., but “we should not be pushing for it to be in every case, all time.”
Patterson noted that a lot of professors, including those at Brock, are doing research into the potential use case for A.I. in the learning environment.
Returning to the topic of academic integrity, Forsythe noted that she was looking forward to conversations around academic integrity that include students.
Patterson stated that “from the academic integrity perspective, we’ve been working hard to create an understanding of the policy in relation to the practice of teaching and learning here and Brock and the ways folks can come together to have conversations about what it means to act with academic integrity and to engage in learning with that in mind in a collaborative spirit and that’s the end goal here.”
As Patterson put it, everyone at Brock is working to get back to that joy component where “folks come here to learn about topics that are of great interest to them,” then posing the question “how do we support students in understanding what academic integrity means and what acting with that integrity means in this really challenging context right now?”
“Generative A.I. has made things challenging for folks in a variety of ways,” according to Patterson, who noted that the portfolio was only recently transferred to CPI’s office and that they are “working on building bridges of communication with all our partners across campus.”
In explaining the “joy component,” Forsythe said that for her, it centred around the fascination, growth of interest and the sense of privilege that came with the task of just learning at the university level.
“There’s so much we don’t know about the world and we get this opportunity to really explore whatever avenue and the entire breadth of human knowledge is possible at a university where you can take all these different pathways. I think that’s a really joyful experience,” said Forsythe. She went on to ask:
“Why would we want to outsource that and not actually incorporate it into our learning so how can we support students to find that joy in their learning?”
CPI is looking to grow its team and continue to build bridges across the Brock community.