Disclaimer regarding the use of artificial intelligence in this textbook

AI Use in the Development of this OER

As mentioned in the Supporting Students to Use AI Effectively section, modelling transparent and responsible use of AI is an important step in teaching effective and ethical use of AI. In order to model this transparency, here is a list of ways that AI tools have been used to produce or improve content for this OER:

• turning a set of notes on a topic into a draft chapter outline;
• generating suggestions for examples and case studies;
• scanning lengthy resources for suggestions of which sections to read for information about practical uses for AI tools in education;
• finding a term that wouldn’t easily come to mind (“what’s it called when students learn something but it wasn’t the primary learning outcome?”);
• as a thesaurus (“what are twenty other ways to say ‘AI tools can be used to…'”);
• for suggestions of how to rephrase sentences that ended up too long, convoluted, or disorganized; and
• generating first drafts of some image alt texts.

AI Tools Referenced in this Resource

Terminology

For the sake of consistency and brevity, the term ‘AI tools’ is used repeatedly throughout this resource in place of ‘generative AI tools’ or ‘genAI tools’. This may refer to AI chatbots like like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, or Claude, which are based on large language models. It may also refer to tools that produce images (like DALL-E or Midjourney) or video (like Sora or Synthesia).

Sample Interactions

This OER contains a number of screenshots showing sample interactions with AI tools, and most of them are interactions with ChatGPT 4.0. This is not necessarily a recommendation of ChatGPT over other AI tools. ChatGPT was chosen for most examples because it is possible to share a link with readers that they can follow to view the full conversation, including full outputs and reprompting. Other AI tools can complete many of the same tasks as ChatGPT—several of them are explored in the Generative AI Tools for Education section.

Linked AI Tools

This resource also links to a number of specialized AI tools. Mentioning or linking to an AI tool does not constitute a recommendation—with limited resources, it wasn’t possible to fully explore every tool mentioned in the resource. It’s suggested that readers evaluate AI tools prior to interacting with them, including their benefits and drawbacks, and how using them at work aligns with their institution’s policies. For more information about how to evaluate an AI tool, visit Critically Evaluating AI Tools from the University of Toronto Libraries.