A Coherent Program-Level Response to AI

Two weeks ago in the newsletter, I shared some data from this summer's Inside Higher Ed student survey on the ways students find generative AI helpful in their learning. Today, I want to point to more data from that survey, this time about institutional responses to AI. When asked how well their colleges and universities are responding to AI and helping students navigate what AI means for their futures, just 37% of students said that their institutions are doing well--and just 10% of students said their institution is taking a "thoughtful and proactive" approach to AI.

I thought about those survey results when reading Lance Eaton's recent blog post, "Agents, Agency, and Action," in which he argues that Year 5 of the GenAI era (that is, the coming academic year) needs to be the year of curricular change. I'm not sure why the students in the Inside Higher Ed survey find their institutions' responses to AI lacking, but I have to think it's at least partially because of what Lance describes in his post:

I've been beating this drum for a while now. As important as it is for individual instructors to make informed, intentional course design choices in response to AI (we wrote a whole book about that!), our students don't take courses in isolation. They take multiple courses concurrently and over time. Departments, programs, and schools need to develop coherent responses to the challenges and opportunities posed by AI. Such a response could focus on policy, like the new University of California Berkeley School of Law AI policy I wrote about last month, which is essentially a school-wide "red light" policy. I've been looking, however, for curricular change that takes a more nuanced approach to the ways that AI is changing the fields for which students are prepared and the ways that students learn with and without AI. I think I've finally found one!

The University of Chicago Law School shared yesterday a document titled "Rethinking Legal Education in the AI Era" which outlines a robust and coherent set of changes the school is making to its curricular structures. The new prohibition of electronic devices (laptops, tablets, phones) in the first-year courses got some attention on the socials, but that's just one component of Chicago Law's new approach to AI. Here are the top-line changes:

1. Required first-year (1L) courses will be device-free in order to support "students' effortful and sustained engagement with the material" in those foundational courses. Exams, in particular, will be conducted during class without devices. There are exceptions to this policy, like the option to have designed student notetakers, the use of devices for in-class polling, and disability accommodations, but it's the same policy across all the 1L courses.
2. The 1L legal research and writing courses, however, will take more of a yellow light approach. "Students will write without AI, while also using AI for research, revision, iterating on drafts, and preparation for oral argument." Where most of the 1L courses are focused on learning without AI, the librarian-led courses will help students learn with AI as part of the schools' goal of teaching "responsible, effective, and ethical use of AI."
3. For elective courses, the device-free policy will be the default but not required policy. In these courses, "the need for coordination across sections abates and the benefits of heterogeneity increases." Instructors of elective courses will be encouraged to adopt the AI-aware teaching practices that make sense for their individual courses, which might involve teaching with and about AI.
4. The "substantial research paper" (SRP) assignment in upper-level writing courses will now include an oral defense. The school feels this assignment can't be completed through wholly in-class work (Lily Abadal might disagree). It will continue to involve "sustained and independent effort across hours, days, and weeks," but students will now have a required "oral discussion of their SRP with their supervising professor, in an in-person setting." The school says this makes the assignment more "AI-resilient" while also helping develop critical oral communication skills.

Y'all, this is pretty good. The curricular changes seem based on input from a variety of law school stakeholders, they've been communicated well and with clear rationales, and they're designed to be provisional and subject to update based on what the school learns through the first pilot year. I have the usual concerns about device-free classrooms (see below), but on the whole I really appreciate how the changes are based on the school's broad learning goals and the ways AI is changing the legal profession. And I expect that the Chicago law students will appreciate clear, consistent, and scaffolded AI policies across their courses!

I'm very curious about the process that led to these curricular changes. The report says a little about that, mentioning consultation with a variety of stakeholders and surveys of the literature on AI and legal education, but I'd love to know if and how faculty buy-in was developed for these fairly significant coordination moves. Did the school have well-developed program-level learning outcomes that are changing now, either to greater emphasize the "essential human" skills mentioned in the report or to include some set of AI competencies? And what feedback mechanisms will the school use to assess the changes in the coming year?

This is a program designed to prepare students for a very specific profession and this is presumably a school that has close ties to that profession, which makes this kind of curricular change a little easier than in, say, a history or sociology program in a college of arts and science. But I suspect that there are elements of the Chicago Law process that would be helpful to other programs looking to respond more coherently to AI.

If you know of other robust curricular responses to generative AI, and especially if you have insight into the processes that led to these changes, please let me know! As Lance Eaton noted, our students deserve more than "curriculum roulette," which makes this work essential to higher ed right now. I'm planning to work this year with at least a couple of programs interested in making AI-motivated curriculum changes, and I'll take all the examples I can get.

(The usual concerns about device-free classrooms: requiring students to seek accommodations for a device means putting a spotlight on those students in the classroom, students with and without disabilities can benefit from learning with devices during class, and today's students have not been prepared for a handwriting-based notetaking experience.)

The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching

My new book, The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, co-authored with Annette Vee and Marc Watkins, is now available as an ebook! It's available through major online retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It's also free for faculty who have adopted a W.W. Norton textbook, so if that's you, ask your Norton rep. If you want to wait for the paperback, it will be available in September 2026, and you can preorder it now.