Teaching AI Literacy

AI literacy teaching builds on teachers’ own understanding of GenAI and supports students in using AI tools critically, ethically, and effectively. You do not need to cover everything at once. Start by choosing one or two skill areas that fit your course, make your expectations explicit, and model how you yourself use and evaluate GenAI. Small, well-chosen steps can already make a significant difference to how students engage with AI in their learning.

Go straight to overview of skill areas

To ensure transparency and clarity, you should discuss GenAI openly and set clear guidelines on when and how it may be used. This includes explaining why GenAI is permitted or restricted in specific tasks, how students should report their use when it is allowed, and what responsible use looks like in practice. Because students vary widely in their familiarity and skill with GenAI tools, clear guidance helps create a more equitable learning environment.  

Some students may feel hesitant to talk about their AI use openly, and in online classes it can be even harder to gauge how students are approaching GenAI. You can use short anonymous polls, discussion prompts, or quick check-ins at the start of a course to explore how students are currently using GenAI and what they find challenging. Inviting students to share their expectations and concerns, and revisiting these agreements later in the course, helps normalise responsible use and makes it easier to adjust guidelines as needed.

Setting clear guidelines

Discussing GenAI use with your students helps establish shared expectations. Confusion often arises when classes have inconsistent or unclear rules, and many teachers feel unsure about how to start these conversations. Strengthening your own AI literacy makes these discussions easier and more effective. Guidelines can be developed together with students or provided as a set of rules they are expected to follow, as long as they are clear and consistently applied. AI Tools and Your Study has information on what students are and aren’t allowed to do while using GenAI, and tips for responsible use. Clear communication about appropriate use and misuse must be backed up by AI‑resilient task and assessment design. Well-designed tasks support achievement of learning outcomes, limit opportunities for misuse, and create opportunities to assure that learning has taken place. Additionally, always ensure that any permitted use of GenAI aligns with your faculty’s policy.

Reporting use

Encouraging transparent reporting of GenAI use helps it support learning without undermining integrity. This way, AI will contribute to the necessary skill development as students have clarity about what is considered appropriate use. Have a look at these documentation formats 

GenAI is increasingly used in both in-class activities and take-home assignments. Some students already rely on it regularly, while others are unsure how to begin or choose not to use it at all. To help students make informed decisions about when and how to use GenAI, it is essential that teachers understand its effective applications and explicitly share this knowledge. This includes offering structured guidance that supports productive use, clarifying what GenAI is most (and least) useful for in specific tasks, and embedding these strategies directly into course activities and assessments.

Depending on what best supports your course, you can integrate the resources below into your teaching, offer them for students to explore independently, or use them as inspiration when planning.

• Student E-learning: introduce the basics, demonstrate responsible use, and help students understand both the possibilities and the limitations of GenAI tools.
• AI pilots FNWI: This playlist provides a collection of 10 videos showcasing GenAI pilots from Science and AUC, with examples from a wide variety of courses.

Modelling effective use

Students learn a great deal from seeing how teachers use GenAI in practice. By demonstrating your own approach, such as sharing example prompts, explaining why you chose them and showing how you evaluated or revised the outputs, you make the process of responsible AI use visible. This helps students understand not only what GenAI can produce but also how to use it critically, ethically, and effectively in their own work. They can illustrate this by sharing examples of their own prompts and showing how these shaped particular answers or responses.

This is a difficult question to answer as the skills that need to be utilised can vary per discipline. It is therefore important that decisions are made to ensure the most appropriate skills are embedded in your courses at the most relevant time. To give you some direction, it might help to refer to one of the AI literacy frameworks that have been developed in addition to your professional knowledge of the graduate attributes needed for your field and to determine which skills are relevant to your context.

In the table you will find some of the commonly featured skills that are good places to start when considering which AI literacy skills to work into your lessons or programme. It is important to note that courses do not necessarily have to address all skills in every course. Decide which 1–2 skill areas are most relevant and focus on those.