Generative AI and Teachers -- For Us or Against Us? A Case Study
Jenny Pettersson, Elias Hult, Tim Eriksson, Tosin Adewumi
TL;DR
The paper investigates university teachers' perceptions and adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) in teaching, addressing benefits, concerns, and policy implications. It employs a bilingual online survey (Swedish/English) across LTU departments, with 12 questions and a pilot, yielding 67 respondents and 35 GenAI users. It finds that over half of respondents use GenAI, predominantly for preparation, with ChatGPT as the most common tool; 59% report an impact on teaching and 55% support legislation due to inaccuracies and cheating. A strong positive correlation exists between perceived teaching impact and willingness to encourage student use ($\rho = +0.9474$, $p = 0.01438$), and most teachers do not expect AI to replace teachers. The results provide practical guidance for policy, training, and assessment design to integrate GenAI responsibly in higher education.
Abstract
We present insightful results of a survey on the adoption of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) by university teachers in their teaching activities. The transformation of education by GenAI, particularly large language models (LLMs), has been presenting both opportunities and challenges, including cheating by students. We prepared the online survey according to best practices and the questions were created by the authors, who have pedagogy experience. The survey contained 12 questions and a pilot study was first conducted. The survey was then sent to all teachers in multiple departments across different campuses of the university of interest in Sweden: Luleå University of Technology. The survey was available in both Swedish and English. The results show that 35 teachers (more than half) use GenAI out of 67 respondents. Preparation is the teaching activity with the most frequency that GenAI is used for and ChatGPT is the most commonly used GenAI. 59% say it has impacted their teaching, however, 55% say there should be legislation around the use of GenAI, especially as inaccuracies and cheating are the biggest concerns.