Crowdsourcing AI Institutional Policies

On creating another repository...

Back in January 2023, I created this  AI Syllabi Policy repository and began crowdsourcing educators’ AI policies and guidance in their syllabi. There’s currently over 170 contributions and it continues to grow. I talk about this repository in this post, but that’s not the focus, just the preamble to today’s post.

About a month ago, Peter Shea reached out and nudged me to think about creating a similar repository for institutional policies. I knew there were a few other sources out there that were doing this in part. For instance, Tracy Mendolia, has this amazing Padlet that is crowdsourced University Policies on Generative AI. It’s pretty amazing. But it’s also a little overwhelming and hard to navigate. I think padlets are great for collecting things as part of an activity, but personally, find them hard to sort through and figure out what is helpful and isn’t.

By contrast, Higher Education Strategy Associates has their AI Observatory which includes this page on Policies & Guidelines. This page does allow for some sorting based on country, and some other key terms (academic integrity, governance, guidelines, inclusion, operations, pedagogy, prohibition, policy, research, and statement). Granted, it isn’t clear what some of those terms means. Still, it’s a useful resource.

But when Peter nudged me and I looked into these, I found they didn’t quite have what I would be looking for or some key details upfront to explore. I’ve been hesitant to do this but he’s not the first to encourage me to do this so I figured I might as well because I wasn’t seeing the thing that I wanted when trying to look at institutional policies.

So I started to build my own crowdsourced Institutional AI Policies & Governance Structures repository. Of course, I’m hoping folks will contribute to it so that it will continue to grow or share it with others to get it in front of others to add their institutional policies.

So why replicate something that’s already out there?

Generally, I’m not a fan of such a practice and yet, was interested in seeing something that felt useful in how I and I know others might use it. I’m thinking in part about my first and second version of the Syllabi AI Policy repository. I started it as a Google Doc which is still the most visited version of it but is also 136 pages and is listed in order of submission. Yet the spreadsheet version that allows one to sort by course, discipline, contributor, rights for re-use, and institution seems much more manageable if you are trying to explore and figure out what policies might be relevant to you.

For institutional policies, I think having both geographic and similarity of institutional type is really important as well as clarity before visiting the policy about who it applies to and what level of coverage is the policy or guideline. I also wanted to include (when someone is volunteering) the opportunity to be a point person for the conversation about the policy at their institution. Because while seeing another institution’s policy is helpful, I think if there’s someone who can give some additional context, that can be an added bonus.

I have hopes that folks will find this resource as useful as the Syllabi AI Policy repository and if not, well, it was certainly worth exploring.

Also, am I missing any other repositories out there that are systematically collecting institutional AI policies? I certainly may have missed and would be curious what else people are going to.

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AI+Edu=Simplified by Lance Eaton is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International