2025 brought even more urgency to finding an answer to the question, “What is the role of educators when it comes to AI?” In early 2025, students recognized AI was generating uncertainty around future job prospects and noted a lack of formal AI integration into their studies. As students voiced the need to understand AI, they didn’t waste any time experimenting with it. 

A 2025 study, published in Education and Information Technologies, focused on university student attitudes toward AI and indicated that more than half of the students in the study (61%) used AI, with 93.8% using ChatGPT. Students in the study cited inaccurate or irrelevant responses in the AI output, which surfaced two issues:

• The need to help learners interpret and validate AI output and
• Designing assessments so that the instructor isn’t devoting time analyzing if the output is from the student or AI. 

So perhaps the question is not “what is the role of educators when it comes to AI?” Perhaps the question is “how do we support students as they build the bridge between conceptual knowledge and application in an AI enabled world?” Instead of wondering what your next step is, here are three practical 2026 goals that busy professors like you can use to quickly get on track with AI. 

Goal #1: Apply your institution’s AI guidelines

The road to supporting students begins with your institution’s AI strategy. Even if your school has adopted a set of AI technologies, you may need to make yourself aware of any AI tools that are deemed as prohibited, so learners don’t use them by mistake⁸ (George Mason University/ITS, n.d.). Like guiding students on using the internet, you cannot protect them from everything, but leveraging the advice from your IT, library, and learning center colleagues can save learners from installing AI tools that may have been banned because they lack security or privacy features. 

Take action now

Simple actions you can take to move this goal forward

• Visit your school website, search for “AI policy,” “academic honesty,” or “generative AI.” 
• Message someone from your Center for Teaching & Learning: “Do we have any AI guidelines, recommendations, or workshops?” 
• Email your librarian and ask: “Does our library offer guidance on ethical or effective AI use for faculty and students?” 

Goal #2: Explore AI on your own and identify real-world examples used in your field

It would be difficult to guide a student on how to use the internet if you never used it yourself. Take time to use AI tools, explore, and experiment. The fastest way to understand the pros and cons of AI is to build these tools into your workflow. Paid versions will be much more capable than free ones (and be wary of the fine print!). Teaming up with your school’s experts first ensures you are using vetted, “closed system” tools. This means you can usually use them with course content without risking problems from putting proprietary school information into free AI tools that use your inputs to train their models. 

You will also want to stay up to date on how AI is reshaping your industry. If you are short on time, consider integrating exploration of real-world AI use into class time with students. This creates more transparency around AI and moves you further away from the idea of trying to “catch” students using it. 

Take action now

Simple actions you can take to move this goal forward

• Subscribe to an AI focused newsletter in your field. When you see a promising use case, run a small experiment to see whether it truly changes practice or is mostly hype. 
• Experiment with an agentic browser on low-stakes work so you can anticipate student use (note: be sure to follow your school’s AI policy before proceeding). 
• Run a quick in-class “AI audit” of your field. Ask students to find one example of AI being used in your profession, then share and discuss benefits, risks, and ethical questions. 

Goal #3: Redesign written activities so they clearly support students’ success 

Just as important as staying current on AI capabilities and use cases in your field is keeping up with research on how students actually learn. MIT’s Media Lab released “Your Brain on ChatGPT,” a study that examined how students’ brains respond when writing with and without AI tools. The researchers found that when AI is introduced too early in the learning process, students show lower brain activity and weaker recall, underscoring the need for well-designed authentic assessments that position AI as a collaborator rather than an answer machine.

As we reconsider the role of written deliverables, their value will likely remain high throughout 2026, since writing is still one of the clearest ways for learners to show how they are thinking about a topic. Academic research is also firmly rooted in written articles that demonstrate organization of ideas, use of evidence, and logical reasoning. In addition, written communication has long been viewed as a core professional skill, so it is unlikely to disappear anytime soon, even if AI can now produce fluent text. Yet the challenge remains: how do we help learners build AI literacy without allowing AI to do the thinking for them?

Take action now

Simple actions you can take to move this goal forward

• If students can use AI, ask them to critique the output for weaknesses as part of a transparent writing process. Pair the final written deliverable with a reflection about what AI gave them, what they used/changed and why. 
• Leverage new strategies for creating online discussions such as using multimedia, asking for highly contextualized responses, and requiring course-specific evidence¹² (Discussion Boards in an AI World, 2025). 
• Test an AI tool on your own written assignments and review what it produces (follow your school’s AI policy). If you cannot distinguish it from student work, redesign the task so students demonstrate the objective in additional ways, such as a short ‘teach the topic’ video in combination with their written submission.

Create your AI action plan

Interested in using AI to help create a personalized AI action plan? Copy our prompt template into your favorite AI tool to begin building your action plan now!

Looking ahead

Working on the three goals outlined above can help you feel more confident and supported heading into your next term. You will have drawn on the expertise and guidance of your campus support teams, given yourself permission to experiment with AI so you better understand its capabilities and real world uses in your field, and spent intentional time reworking written deliverables, which are still one of the most common AI related challenges for professors. Together, working on these goals will put you in a strong position to support your students and yourself as AI continues to evolve.