5. Conclusion

The motivation of this work was to explore whether a learning agreement can be an acceptable tool for governing student use of GenAI in university coursework. Results of the pilot study, with students rating the learning agreement approach favourably at the end of the course, suggest that despite the flaws in how it was implemented, a learning agreement has potential to serve this role. Furthermore, the design of the learning agreement and course modifications presented offer a flexible path through which students can be brought to engage with ethical discussions surrounding the use of GenAI in a situated and relevant manner. Such agreements can go beyond university guidelines as they can be used to both scaffold educator adaptations of guidelines to match course needs and the rapidly changing technological landscape and communicate the adaptations to students in an actionable manner. All in all, learning agreements have the potential to offer an interface through which student decision-making can be supported and interactions among students, educators, researchers, and policy makers related to the ethical and societal challenges of GenAI can take place.

Acknowledgements

This work has been partially funded by UPF’s PlaCLIK (E2023015714), Erasmus+ (KA220-SCH-92001A07), the Government of Catalonia (SGR 00930), Spanish Ministry (PID2020- 112584RB-C33 granted by MICIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033). DHL (Serra Húnter) acknowledges the support by ICREA (Academia).