The Learning Design Center supports faculty in preparing students to use generative AI responsibly, ethically, and thoughtfully within their disciplines and professions, and providing them opportunities to communicate transparency about AI use.
A transformational educational experience includes helping students understand and critically evaluate AI use in relation to their own values, academic integrity, and disciplinary expectations. This means providing students with appropriate knowledge and skills to use AI tools, while also creating opportunities for reflection, ethical judgment, and responsible decision-making around the limitations, risks, and biases of AI systems.
To guide our shared understanding of AI literacy, LDC uses the definition of AI literacy as “a set of competencies that enables individuals to critically evaluate AI technologies; communicate and collaborate effectively with AI; and use AI as a tool online, at home, and in the workplace” (Long, et al. 2020). These 17 competencies can be applied in conjunction with course and module learning outcomes.
Using this AI Literacy Framework, we can support faculty in designing curricula that support students in:
Recognizing AI
Identify when a tool or technology uses artificial intelligence and when it does not.
Understanding AI’s capabilities and limitations
Distinguish between basic AI tools and more advanced AI concepts, including where AI is most useful and where human judgment remains essential.
Understanding how AI learns and makes decisions
Explain that AI systems use data, patterns, and rules to make predictions, recommendations, or decisions.
Recognizing the human role in AI
Understand that people design, build, train, adjust, and make decisions about how AI systems are developed and used.
Considering AI’s impact on society
Examine how AI affects privacy, work, fairness, misinformation, future technologies, and tools such as robots and smart devices.
AI literacy is not only a technical skill. It includes critical thinking, ethical reasoning, reflection, communication, disciplinary judgment, and informed decision-making.