AI for OER Discovery: Responsible Use: Searching for OER with AI

Confidentiality and Data Security of Student, Faculty, Staff, and Institutional Information

To best locate OER, you will need to borrow language from your course content. There are situations where you should never upload any institutional documents to an AI tool, including syllabi or course assignment descriptions. Engineering a prompt with generalized content from a syllabus or assignment works, but requires proper data stewardship. When prompting AI to help locate OER, faculty and students must be mindful of data privacy concerns:

DO NOT include:

• identifying information such as the names of individuals who work at or attend Farimont State University 
• the name of the institution itself
• course numbers
• intellectual property or unpublished content (including copy/pasting assignment details and course descriptions)
• information regarding internal tools or platforms
• any contact information of faculty, staff, or students (including email, phone numbers, office numbers/hours, etc.)
• links that direct users to course content

To responsibly provide proper context for your prompt, include:

• field/course content-specific terminology 
• paraphrased/summarized course descriptions, learning objectives, and assignment details
• author names or field-specific keywords found in course recommended reading lists (so long as they are published)

It is your responsibility to discuss the process of locating OER utilizing course content with your professor. If you are unsure what information you may ethically include in an AI prompt, check with your professor or contact the library for further guidance.

Using AI to find and suggest OER content should never result in diminished pedagogical or ethical practice. When finding OER to design course content or complete coursework:

• Evaluate the relevance and academic rigor of the content.
• Analyze OER recommendations for data biases (such as lack of representation in topics or perspectives).
• Critically evaluate OER suggestions and how they support a course's learning outcomes, because you are responsible for designing a course or completing an assignment responsibly.

Note: Just because something has an open license does not mean you do not have to cite the material when you use it for your coursework.

It is the responsibility of the faculty to understand how copyrighted content is allowed to be used in the design of their courses. Fairmont State University has a very clear and publicly available Copyright Policy. The Copyright Policy does not explicitly govern interactions between institutionally owned content and AI tools. However, it provides all of the guidance you'll need to inform your usage of copyrighted materials belonging to the institution and external sources.

Note: There are specific situations where Fairmont State University may claim copyright ownership over content you produce (refer to section 2.6 in the Copyright Policy for faculty and section 2.8 in the Copyright Policy for students).  

The free version of every AI tool you would use to locate OERs will not perform as well as the version that comes with a paid subscription. For example, ChatGPT's Deep Research feature, available with no limit for Pro subscribers, is much more proficient at locating OER than the free version. As AI tools advance and become better, more efficient research assistants, we must be mindful of the widening digital divide for students, faculty, and staff.