IT Meets Academia: Giving Students the Tech Tools to Write the AI Rules

An AI administrator walks into an Honors English seminar. The assignment: prepare undergraduates to help write the course AI policy. This UNLV case study follows an unusual collaboration between a professor of postcolonial literature and the administrator of the university’s ChatGPT and Claude environments. The administrator also wrote UNLV’s draft institutional AI framework and experiences classroom AI rules as a PhD student. The session asks what becomes possible when the person who sees the systems behind the interface joins faculty and students in the policy conversation. Before students could write the rules, they needed enough technical literacy to understand what they were governing: model limitations, learning tradeoffs, differences between consumer and institutional accounts, data practices, authorship, transparency, and personal boundaries. The presenters will trace how that foundation prepared students to participate in course policy development. Dr. Beth Rosenberg will share why she invited IT into an English seminar, how students responded, and how the policy took shape. Attendees will leave with an adaptable model for combining IT knowledge, faculty expertise, and student agency to create AI expectations grounded in both technology and learning.