As artificial intelligence tightens its grip on the digital world, higher education professors are kept on their toes, changing their policies and curriculums with each new advancement.
College professors have varying opinions on AI, ranging from fascination with the new technology to anger about the negative repercussions, fear of its rapid growth and everything in between.
The University Faculty Council worked with the President’s Office throughout the spring of 2024 to create a Generative AI Task Force Report, which lays out AI policies and recommendations for university departments.
This report recommends what the task force determined as ethical and responsible use and approved tools, such as ChatGPT Edu, Adobe Firefly and Microsoft Copilot. It also allows individual schools and their faculty to set course-level rules for various AI platforms.
Individual schools, departments and professors at IU are allowed to create their own AI policies for students to abide by. Dave Groobert, senior lecturer of public relations in the Media School, changes his AI and technology policies depending on the class he is teaching.
“I alter my AI policy for each class, depending on what the learning objectives are,” he said. “You can’t have a one-size-fits-all policy.”
For his public relations writing class, Groobert doesn’t prohibit the use of AI, but he does discourage it for final submissions. Students may use AI on a first draft or for initial ideas, but after that he said they must heavily edit to make it their own work.
“Professors have got to change the paradigm of how they are teaching and assessing,” professor Susan Drumm, a visiting clinical assistant professor in the School of Education’s Department of Instructional Systems Technology, said. “If we continue to give multiple-choice tests and teach in a lecture-only manner, there’s going to continue to be cheating.”
A Copyleaks study from 2025 found that 90% of 1,100 college students surveyed have used AI academically, with 73% saying their AI usage increased last year.
Groobert and Drumm believe AI is not going to go away any time soon, so Drumm said both teachers and students must embrace it. She said students must learn to use AI in education to be successful in a working world where it is now a prominent factor.
“Students who are going to be graduating going into the workforce today need to have a working knowledge of Gen AI and how to apply it, ” Groobert said. “Employers are asking about Gen AI. They want to hire people who see Gen AI as an additive tool, if used properly, but they also want people who can still think on their own and write well without it.”
Groobert said proficiency in AI is becoming a hiring baseline and both students and teachers must adapt to best work with the changing values.
“Companies that say AI can replace humans – who’s gonna run that AI, who’s gonna teach that AI, who’s gonna update that AI?” Margaret Lion, a senior lecturer in kinesiology in the IU School of Public Health, said.
Lion teaches a computer skills and technology class, so her students can use AI for almost all class work, because those are exactly the skills the class aims to build.
“If AI is doing it, you’re not learning it,” Lion said.
Lion makes sure to warn her students to be careful of misinformation. She said AI is not a finished product and often tends to hallucinate, and that it is dangerous for people who don’t verify the information.
“The first thing I do is think about the ethical implications of what I do, then I look at, ‘is this a time saver for me that’s worth the environmental impact?’. And then I look at, ‘how can I take this information and ensure that it is valid and reliable?’” Deborah Getz, associate clinical professor in the IU Department of Applied Health Science, said.
All four faculty members said there are many important ethical elements to consider when using Gen AI, especially when working with sensitive information. AI stores and repurposes information, so anything private or personal that is exposed to AI may become available for use, which can create copyright issues, according to the U.S. Copyright Office.
“When you put things into a Gen AI model, you don’t know where that information is going to be warehoused, or where it could show up again in the future,” Groobert said.
With how rapidly AI has grown and changed in the last several years, it is difficult to predict where it will go in the future, Groobert said, but it will most likely be even more integrated into our daily lives across the board.
“I’m both excited and petrified,” Getz said. “It’s got to be ethical and it’s got to be valid.”
