Communicating AI restrictions to students
Artificial intelligence offers new opportunities and challenges in education. It’s important to guide students to use AI correctly and ethically. When a student is enrolled in multiple courses, it is beneficial to have a similar way to communicate how AI is used during a course.
Labels are a simple and effective way to communicate restrictions. Label can help students to find instructions in assignments, sections or course level. The problem with single lable is that it does not carry enough detail information for singe restriction so it is necessary to have descriptive text to clarify restriction in that specific context.
In Aalto University, at least in ARTS, ENG, and CHEM, we have seen schools that have introduced similar labels, icons or instructions. Based on the need and existing instructions, we have released a set of ready-made label elements in MyCourses to help unify communication. These labels are based on AIAS1 (The Artificial Intelligence Assessment Scale) and instructions in Aalto Schools. Labels are located in the TinyMCE editor, so they are available when teachers write instructions or descriptions for assignments or sections of the course. Teachers can modify the label descriptions as they wish, and to make this tool even more useful, we have also added teachers a possibility to add links to Aalto University AI related resources and guidelines under badge description. You can provide a link to the Aalto AI assistant or link to guidelines if needed.
Five levels and default Labels and their descriptions available in MyCourses
AI Forbidden. Use of generative or any other AI is strictly prohibited in any part of the coursework. 
AI Restricted to Ideation Only. No AI content is allowed in the final submission or any provided artifacts. Use allowed for ideation only i.e. brainstorming, structuring, etc. 
AI Allowed with Approval and Attribution. Pre-AI drafts must be submitted for evaluation and all AI use must be properly attributed.
AI Allowed with Attribution. AI can be used freely to complete tasks as needed. Any AI generated content must be cited.
AI as part of the task. AI use allowed throughout the assignment to support your own work and you do not have to specify which content is created with help of AI but you need to correctly reference all the sources for the information you have included in your work.
Find all ready-made label descriptions in Aalto.fi Tips for Teachers on using artificial intelligence in teaching page and how to add and modify labes is explaned in MyCourses help.
In some cases teacher just want to say that usage of AI is no allowed during the whole course. In these cases teacher can use ready-made slide set for communication. Find Slide set in Tips for Teachers on using artificial intelligence in teaching in Aalto.fi (you need to be logged in).
We hope that this kind of elements help teachers and students to communicate specific restrictions better. If there is a need for more elements or tweak current ones, please contact us MyTeaching Support support.
- The Artificial Intelligence Assessment Scale (AIAS): A Framework for Ethical Integration of Generative AI in Educational Assessment. (2024). Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice, 21(06). https://doi.org/10.53761/q3azde36) ↩︎
