23 June 2025

AI has an increasing impact on education, including in the Faculty of Humanities. Students, study programmes and teachers therefore need to have clear rules or guidelines, as well as opportunities to gain and exchange experiences.

Guidelines and rules
The following developments are currently taking place in the area of guidelines and rules:

• The e-learning module for students, which is included in all Brightspace modules, is being reviewed and updated.
• In the near future, the university will introduce guidelines for teachers on the use of GenAI in education.
• In mid-August, teachers will be informed about faculty rules and guidelines for students on the use of GenAI in assessments. It is particularly important to think about additional elements of assessments (such as holding them on campus) that enable teachers to be certain that the students do the work themselves.

Try-outs 
Meanwhile at ECOLe, together with the ISSC and teachers who have registered for this, we are setting up various pilots to investigate how GenAI can be used to make education more active and reduce teachers’ workload. We are doing this in a secure university environment for chatbots, where teachers can try things out safely.

For example, we are learning about the extent to which AI can give formative feedback on essays, using AI to help students practise their foreign language writing skills, and making lectures more interactive by using AI to test students’ knowledge. We are also working with the ATC on a speech bot, which language students can use to practise their speaking skills, and exploring the combination of subject knowledge and prompt engineering, where students themselves build a subject-specific chatbot.

We use the university platform LUCA (Leiden University Cognitive Agent) or these pilots, so that the data remain protected. We also use the COMPASS evaluation framework to ensure that our work is ethical, open and sustainable.

If you’d like to know more about AI in education or to start a pilot yourself, please contact ECOLe via ecole@hum.leidenuniv.nl.

More information
At present, more information can be found at:

• a university webpage for students: ChatGPT: What is possible and what is allowed?;
• a faculty ECOLe webpage for teachers: AI as challenge and support, which includes hyperlinks to other relevant sites/modules within and outside Leiden University;
• the faculty ECOLe webpage on Fraud and plagiarism (in the “Testing and assessment” section), where there is explicit discussion of GenAI.