Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation

Teaching, learning, and assessment with Generative AI

  1. Home
  2. Teaching guidance
  1. Introduction
  2. Generative AI tools licensed for UQ Staff
  3. Assessment and Generative AI
  4. Testing your assessment
  5. Appropriate use of Generative AI
  6. Detecting the use of Generative AI
  1. Communicating assessment expectations
  2. Using Generative AI in your work
  3. Resources and guides for students
  4. Events and resources
  5. Help and support

1. Introduction

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools create content based on a prompt that can include text, PDF’s, images and videos. Generated content commonly includes images, code, text, and video. Generative AI is a powerful tool but has a range of limitations.

ChatGPT acknowledges its platform: 

  • may occasionally generate incorrect information
  • may occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content
  • has limited knowledge of the world and events after 2021 (ChatGPT, OpenAI, 2023). 

UQ's position

University Senior Leadership (2023) has agreed that for UQ:

“The ongoing advances in Generative AI technologies present both opportunities and challenges for teaching and assessment. Its availability requires ongoing appraisal of our teaching and assessment design, evaluation, and governance.

While protecting academic integrity is critical, we also acknowledge the increasing prevalence of AI in our everyday lives, making it critical for us to help students to understand its ethical and effective use.”

In March 2024, Teaching Learning and Student Experience Committee endorsed including Machine Translation (MT) in this position.  

In responding to TEQSA’s request for information about how UQ is addressing the risk of artificial intelligence, UQ identified key principles to guide our work: 

  • Employing evidence-informed approaches to understand and respond to the impact of change to teaching, learning and assessment, alongside the evolving experiences of our staff and students.
  • Working in partnership with students, staff, and community partners to promote a culture of active engagement with AI throughout the entire educational journey.
  • Integrating AI across all appropriate aspects of our work, curriculum, and teaching to equip graduates with the skills for future AI applications in their disciplines, while also enhancing the quality and efficiency of teaching activities.
  • Developing new assessment approaches to maintain credible assessment of learning outcomes and strengthen assessment integrity in response to emerging AI capabilities.
  • Monitoring assessment practices university wide to maintain assessment security and credibility alongside student integrity.
  • Prioritising student well-being and equity of access and reduce anxiety by providing clear and integrated guidelines on acceptable AI use in assessments, particularly at transition points such as first and final years or course work to higher degree research studies.
  • Maintaining data management governance to ensure cybersecurity and the privacy of student and staff data.
  • Supporting staff to adapt to the rapid changes required by evolving AI with appropriate guidance and resources.

UQ is leading a range of projects, workshops, pilots and research to explore the use of AI in Teaching and Learning.

UQ’s AI in Teaching and Learning initiatives (PDF, 228.6 KB)

Explore Generative AI

An important step in supporting students to understand the ethical and effective use of Generative AI is to explore these tools yourself. You can follow these guides to create an account and try some prompts. It may take a few attempts to find prompts that generate responses that are useful to you. If you feel stuck, try some of Jason Tangen’s examples or talk to a learning designer.

ITS have developed guidance for using AI chatbots from a cyber-security perspective. 

How students are using AI

Research led by Kelly Matthews with Christine Slade is exploring how students are using AI. Winter research students Claudia Maya and Alessandra Tran developed a guide for staff (PDF, 217.3 KB) based on this work.