Co-Designing For Integrity: A Student Partnership Approach to Developing Ethical AI Literacy Resources in Higher Education

Abstract

Educators and institutions are grappling with how to navigate the integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) while preserving academic integrity and human-centred education. The rapid emergence of GenAI has created a persistent disconnect between institutional policy and practice, leaving students and staff to manage ambiguity in which anxiety often displaces agency. This paper reports on a Design-Based Research (DBR) study that explored how a theoretically informed, co-designed pedagogical strategy can support the development of ethical AI literacy, defined as students’ knowledge, reasoning, and regulatory capacities to use GenAI ethically. Drawing on a Student–Staff Partnership (SSP) methodology grounded in regulatory learning theory and emotion regulation, we iteratively developed and formatively evaluated a multimodal educational module within the Faculty of Science of a research-intensive Australian university. Independent quality review provided formative evidence that the co-design process produced resources perceived as authentic, accessible, and empathetically framed. Pilot implementation, however, revealed a critical challenge: an opt-in delivery model had limited reach among the intended audience. From this work we advance four emergent, testable design principles for ethical pedagogy: partner for authenticity, scaffold ethical self-regulation, attend to holistic competence, and employ empathy as pedagogy. The findings suggest a need for educators to embed AI literacy directly into curriculum, moving beyond centralised, opt-in supports.