The Ethical Use of AI in Education: Student and Faculty Personas
Designed by Openi
Much of the conversation about AI in education has been around how to incorporate or prevent misuse of AI in teaching and learning. What if the underlying question is more about what we should be asking students and teachers to better understand their values and the root of their ethical concerns? Without this knowledge, it would be difficult to create a standard of practice in the classroom that supports a thriving learning environment in today’s technological realities.
The McCoy Family Center of Ethics in Society interviewed 25 students and talked to 15 professors for their insights and found that the technology has eroded trust between the two groups. In an effort to promote better understanding, we used the information gathered to create personas - fictional but realistic descriptions of the types of people we interviewed.
5 ways to use the personas and tools in the classroom and on campus:
- Syllabus & Policy Co-Design (Faculty): Before setting your course AI policy, review the 7 student personas. Ask: Which of these students will be sitting in my room? How does my policy support or penalize each one?
- Icebreaker & Norm-Setting (Faculty): During the first week of class, share the student persona cards. Have students identify which persona they most relate to in order to demystify AI norms without fear of judgment.
- Group Project Norm-Setting (Students): Before starting a group project, have everyone pick the persona that best matches how they handle AI. It immediately reveals mismatched expectations—like one teammate using AI for drafting while another morally opposes it—so you can set shared ground rules upfront.
- Navigating "Gray Area" Dilemmas (Students): When you’re stuck deciding if using AI for a specific task (like debug code or organizing outline notes) crosses into cheating or is helping or hindering your learning, run the scenario through a tool in the Ethics Toolkit. It gives you a quick, step-by-step way to evaluate your motivation and the potential outcomes, helping you make a value driven decision.
- Role-Reversal Workshops (Department): Host a department session where faculty adopt student personas and students take on faculty personas. Walk through real scenarios (e.g., "Is using AI for outline generation acceptable?") to build empathy and clear boundaries.
What We Learned
We talked in depth to 25 graduate and undergraduate students in humanities, social science, computer science and engineering. Their comments reflected near-universal anxiety about AI, but their differences allowed us to group them into seven personas. The group includes: those who morally oppose AI; those who overuse AI and can’t stop; those who fear they are at a disadvantage because they follow rules and their classmates don’t. We gathered additional feedback from students at a workshop that informed how we refined the personas and what we would ask faculty.
To get faculty perspective, we gathered information from 15 faculty members that we then used to create five personas. Some oppose student use of AI in their classes; they think it undermines learning. Some use AI liberally themselves and worry that it’s not fair to limit student use. Some feel it’s not the student’s responsibility, but the teacher’s responsibility to prevent cheating by redesigning their assignments. Several have incorporated AI into their curricula.
Resources for Download
We have produced three tools we hope will help faculty develop guidelines and design nuanced, student-centered classroom policies with a better understanding of the types of students in their classes. The tools include:
Student Personas Deck: A visual deck that translates the diverse student experiences into seven AI user personas. The portrayals convey student attitudes, fears and anxieties about AI as well as how and why they use the technology. The deck is followed by two sets of reflection questions, one for faculty to consider and another for students to consider.
Professor Personas: A list of professor personas based on their AI use and classroom policies.
Ethics Toolkit: A actionable toolkit that provides a systematic way to make ethical choices.
We hope these resources will serve as an actionable bridge for educators and students navigating new educational norms and ethics together. Instructors looking for further guidance on integrating AI into their teaching can also find teaching and learning resources through Stanford's Center for Teaching and Learning.
Credits & Licensing
Writer & Persona Creator: This article was written and the personas were created by Betsy Morris, Case Study Writer and Researcher at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University, with the financial support of the Project Liberty Institute.
Ethics Toolkit Creators: The toolkit was created by Manuela Travaglianti, PhD, Project Lead and Researcher, and Thomas Both, Designer, at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University, with the financial support of the Project Liberty Institute.
Visual Design: Visual design and illustrations for the Student Persona Card Deck were created by Openi (openi.offerings [at] pm.me (openi[dot]offerings[at]pm[dot]me)).
Licensing & Reuse: All tools in this collection are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. You are free to copy, modify, distribute, and adapt these resources for any purpose—provided you give appropriate credit to the original creators and indicate if changes were made.