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.
Keywords
Generative AI, Higher Education, Academic Integrity, Co-design, AI Literacy.