Abstract:

Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially Generative AI (GenAI), is impacting academic life for all stakeholders. While offering opportunities like enhanced learning and assessment, its uncritical and unethical use raises critical academic integrity, social, and environmental sustainability issues. This highlights a strong need for GenAI literacy and comprehensive institutional policies. As innovation centres, universities have a unique responsibility to guide GenAI's ethical and effective use. Many are developing guidelines, but the landscape is fragmented, creating an urgent need for clarity and systematic analysis. This research investigates how 16 leading universities (identified across major rankings) are formulating and communicating their GenAI guidelines to address these complexities. Using inductive content analysis of publicly available website materials, preliminary findings show that guidelines target all academic community members, stressing the key role of faculty and staff in disseminating directives or integrating them into curricula. Guidelines cover GenAI adoption actions: pre-usage elements that explain universities' attitudes towards AI and try to foster awareness; implementation actions that detail practical procedures; post-usage, which emphasises responsibility, ownership, and maintenance actions to promote a sustainable looking-forward approach. However, many guidelines remain general, allowing broad interpretation and not always offering optimal solutions. While valuable, guidelines are only one approach to managing GenAI. By providing a clearer picture of current developments, the research contributes to theoretical and practical advancements, offering a foundation for future inquiries into the role of GenAI in Higher Education. Future work should focus on reducing ambiguity and enhancing the applicability of these guidelines. By doing so, institutions could explore alternative approaches to foster a critical and effective integration of GenAI into teaching and learning.

Keywords:

(Gen)AI Guidelines, Higher Education, Teaching and Learning, Ethics.