How Georgia Southern Is Leading AI Integration Into Higher Education Policymaking

“Everybody freaked out about the calculator when the calculator came out,” said Robert Terry, Ph.D., associate professor of English and Faculty Senate president. “They freaked out when the internet came out. They freaked out when Wikipedia came out. The same kind of binary is true for what generative AI is doing.”

In the last year, Georgia Southern University has expanded the number of courses incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into the curriculum. This includes teaching students ethical practices using AI, analyzing large data sets and other professional uses. As AI continues to grow in use and influence, University faculty are developing policy guidelines for how faculty, staff and students may use it in higher education.

Georgia Southern’s Faculty Senate recently launched an AI Policy Ad Hoc Committee to establish a universal rulebook for how AI can be used at Georgia Southern. According to their charging language, the committee “identify best practices used across higher education we might incorporate, and to draft a responsive generative AI policy that presents meaningful frameworks for ethically integrating.”

The ad hoc committee has been taking a scientific approach to develop recommendations for a university-wide policy on AI to balance innovation and academic integrity. With that, faculty members have been collecting testimonials from their colleagues, students, industry experts, alumni and other stakeholders.

“AI’s abilities are growing exponentially,” said Terry. “So, it’s going to be a challenge. It’s a question of how do we address things? How do we shape our response? How do we create sites for what we’re supposed to do as teachers and career skills developers? It’s hard to know.”

The ad hoc committee began their work in the winter of 2024, and gained feedback from important stakeholders, including local employers, alumni, faculty and students through the spring of 2025. However, in April 2025, the Board of Regents asked that each University System of Georgia school develop an AI policy by October 2025. The work of the ad hoc policy is now being combined with administrative support to develop the policy in a way that is flexible, but also meaningfully addresses academic integrity concerns.

Terry and his fellow committee members acknowledge the challenge isn’t only in finding consensus across the University. He said there will be additional challenges with hesitancy among other faculty and staff to adopt AI programs, having students change how they use the tools and concerns with where AI gets its information from.

AI as Curriculum

Terry and other professors have said it’s critical for the University community as a whole to learn how to use AI as a tool, and learn how to teach the use of it practically in their fields.

The Department of English has a First-Year Writing Program, which gives students a strong foundation for professional communication. The primary course in this program, ENGL1101, was recently adapted to include AI literacy and other related skills. This pilot course is called ENGL1101@Work.

“We’re trying to tackle that challenge head on, and get students to think about how this tool can be used, how it should be used and what are the questions you have to think about as a writer,” said Annie Mendenhall, Ph.D., associate professor of English. “That’s very different from other sections of English where they may or may not get those instructions in AI.”

This class helps students understand how to analyze arguments and persuasive messages. With the addition of AI as a tool, it

allows students to work on communication skills that are specific

to their profession.

English students are taught to use it as a tool in the writing process and to assist in analyzing large texts for major themes and make their writing more efficient. Students were also tested to spot the difference between an AI-written story and one written by a person. This exercise shows students the value in the personal touch of a written story and understanding audience analysis and finding mistakes and misinformation.

“AI is going to be a thing in the future and we can’t control that,” said Luke Miller, communications sophomore. “That’s just a thing that’s going to happen. So, knowing how to use it and knowing how to function with it, and also knowing how to tell what’s AI and what’s not, is good to know. It’s pretty much preparing us for the future.”

It’s not just the arts and humanities utilizing AI in their curriculum. The University’s School of Nursing incorporated it to analyze a wealth of medical information, clarify a patient’s information and help a student walk through the diagnostic process.

“I use it to help the students differentiate between similar concepts,” said Kathryn Zeigler, DNP, BSN program director on the Armstrong Campus. “Say there’s five different reasons a woman can have elevated blood pressure in pregnancy. I provide a prompt for the students while modeling how you use the tool to narrow down what the reason is for the patient. AI does the definition dumping for them, and it gives them a starting point, and then they do the final part.”

Faculty Skepticism

As the number of AI platforms continues to grow, so does the number of professors more relaxed with the idea of it being used in classrooms.

“I felt unsure,” said Zeigler. “What does this mean? Will this mean that my students don’t have to learn?”

Ziegler’s outlook shifted after attending a professional development conference, and joining faculty-led book studies on AI. The professor now advocates for using AI as a supportive tool rather than a shortcut, incorporating it into assignments in ways that encourage critical thinking

and responsible use. This ensures students learn to navigate evolving technologies with care and discernment.

“You can’t really bury your head in the sand,” said Zeigler. “It’s here whether you feel positively or negatively about it. It’s here.”

Meanwhile, there are others who immediately embraced the programs. While the gadgety nature of AI can be intriguing, even supporters acknowledged it’s too soon for quantifiable results.

“I see the impact, but the problem is, you don’t know how to measure that impact,” said Estelle Bester, Ph.D., associate professor of nursing. “So, I think the impact is there, but we don’t know yet. How are we going to measure to see if it makes a difference?”

Other faculty have been somewhat reluctant to bring AI into their spheres, but the numbers are trending upward. According to the Faculty Senate’s data, 57.3% of Georgia Southern faculty members use AI in their teaching, and 32.5% use it for their scholarly research. But there’s a disparity among the colleges. The College of Education saw 78% of instructors using AI in some fashion for their teaching, whereas the Allen E. Paulson College of Engineering and Computing saw only 39% usage.

To say AI is teaching in the classroom would be a misrepresentation of how it’s used. According to the same Faculty Senate survey, roughly half of the faculty incorporating AI in the classroom use it to help write test questions and generation discussion questions.

Citations / Intellectual Property

One of the more predominant concerns is AI doing the students’ homework for them. Students are warned early on that it’s considered a forbidden fruit.

“Usually when college classes are bringing up AI, it’s: if you use it, you’re getting kicked out of school,” said Yasmin Lewis, Georgia Southern English sophomore. “AI is plagiarism; if you get caught plagiarizing, you have to go. So, I thought of them as forbidden spells or something.”

Students aren’t being trained to rely on the software for answers, but instead how to think about a problem in a different way and discover the major themes of a topic.

“It can actually help them build stronger critical thinking skills and help them manage tasks without doing the work for them,” said Mendenhall. “And it does that without sidestepping the learning process.”

However, students are also being warned about the limits of artificial intelligence. When practicing with the software programs, students were taught about “hallucinations,” where an AI platform will answer questions incorrectly or make up false information.

“Sometimes it would come up with information on its own,” said Lewis. “I thought it was just supposed to say, ‘I don’t know’ if it didn’t have answers. No, it would just come up with something and lie. Then, it would then admit to coming up with false information.”

Some departments are remedying this Achilles’ heel by using AI software from private publishers. While some classes work on learning the mechanics of more public AI platforms, other courses have been using closed-circuit software that isn’t available to the general public and keeps information specific to an industry. For example, a selection of the School of Nursing’s textbooks feature an integrated AI function.

“We have to remind them that AI is taking language, and predicting the rest of a sentence; it’s not thinking,” said Bester. “Even though this is pulling from your textbook, it may not be correctly answering the question. It may have correct information in it, but it’s still not human thinking. This tool can help us get to solutions, but the skilled professional still needs to step in.”

— Jacob Notermann