Author: Deb Mundorff, Ecampus Instructional Designer
Last year, as the instructional designer for a software engineering course, I knew the instructor had leaned on AI throughout the course’s development. I suggested he be transparent about it with his students. After all, he was asking the same of them.
What he wrote back went further than I expected. His syllabus statement opens not with rules for students but with an accounting of his own use. He names Claude the second author of his course, separates his own contribution from what emerged from that collaboration, and only then turns to what students may do. After getting his permission, I shared it with my team. Within minutes, colleagues were asking to keep it as an example. One had just come from a webinar where participants argued faculty shouldn’t have to disclose their own AI use at all.
Their reaction was telling. Instructional designers see a lot of syllabus statements, and this one stopped people. It fit what I keep hearing from faculty: they are no longer asking whether to address AI in the syllabus, but how to do it well.
Plenty of instructors still open with a different question: can I just ban it? I understand the impulse, but it is the wrong place to start. AI is already in your course, in your students’ hands, whether or not your syllabus mentions it. When Bowen and Watson (2026) talked with students, some said that if an instructor never mentioned AI, they took the silence as a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Students brainstorm with it, run drafts past it, and ask it to re-explain what you covered last week. Ban it outright, and you’ve got a policy you can’t enforce and students who use it quietly anyway. I made that case at more length in Students Don’t Want AI Bans, They Want a Seat at the Table. What your syllabus has to sort out is where AI helps students learn and where it gets in the way, and then say which is which in plain terms.
What changed is not that AI arrived. It is what AI can do.
A couple of years ago, using AI meant asking a chatbot for a paragraph and pasting the result. That is still common. What is different now is scope. Generative AI answers a prompt. Agentic AI takes a goal and works through the steps to reach it. Point it at an assignment, and it can plan, draft, and revise the work. It hands back something finished, with little from the student.
This shift matters for your syllabus, because it changes what doing the work means. A policy written for a student who copies one answer from an AI tool is aimed at the wrong target. That does not mean everything is permitted; it means deciding on purpose which uses belong in your course and which do not, rather than letting silence decide for you. Here is the question your syllabus has to answer: in this course, what part of the work has to be the student’s own, and how will they show it?
A good statement does two jobs.
The first is obvious. Tell students what they may and may not do with AI. Do it assignment by assignment, since a tool that undermines one task may be right for another. Tie the rule to the point of the assignment. “Do not use AI to draft your reflection, because the thinking is the assignment” gives students a reason they can act on. A blanket ban does not.
The second is easier to forget. Say how you use AI too. If you used it to build a study guide, draft feedback, or write practice questions, tell students. It models the honest, purposeful use you are asking of them. At OSU, Ecampus collects AI tools and faculty support resources, including sample syllabus and assignment statements you can adapt.
Write it like you mean it.
The statements that work read like a person wrote them, not a policy office. A good one names what students can do that a model cannot, and makes building those skills the point of the course. Remind students that their own thinking and voice are worth developing; that does more to shape how they work than any list of don’ts. And if your campus hands you boilerplate policy language, treat it as a floor rather than the finished statement, then build your own on top.
The software engineering instructor I opened with is the clearest example I have. His statement spends several paragraphs on his own use of AI before it says a word about students’. He marks off what is his: the structure, the pedagogy, the assessments, and the running software example he wrote for his own textbook. Then he names three ways he worked with AI: as a conversational partner, as a second author on the course materials, and as a software developer. He is specific about the tool and the timeline, down to which modules he wrote before starting to use it. And he is clear that the collaboration made the course better, more engaging and more technically sound, rather than easier.
“I want to be completely transparent about how I have used GenAI to author this course.”
Only then does he turn to students:
“I strongly encourage you to use GenAI in this course as thoughtfully, conscientiously, and deliberately as I have used it to develop this course.”
Chris Hundhausen, software engineering. Shared with permission.
That last line works because of everything before it. He earned the right to ask by putting his own record on the table.
Whatever you write, plan to revisit it. The tools will change before next term. So will the way your students use them. A statement you can update in ten minutes each term beats a perfect one you write once and forget.
Offer a seat, not a rulebook.
So decide which part of the work must be your students’ own, and how they will demonstrate it. Be clear with them about what learning in your course requires. You can ask your students to help, since they are much more likely to honor and understand a policy they helped build.
A note on process: the argument, examples, and choices here are mine. I used an AI assistant to pressure-test the structure and tighten the wording, the same transparency this piece asks of you.
Reference
Bowen, J. A., & Watson, C. E. (2026). Teaching with AI: A practical guide to a new era of human learning (2nd ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press.
