Prompting for Instructors
Generative AI can help faculty streamline course preparation, create instructional materials, and draft communications. Writing effective prompts helps AI generate responses that are more relevant, accurate, and useful for your teaching goals.
What Makes a Good Prompt?
To write an effective prompt, describe the task, the type of response you want, and any relevant context. Think of prompting as giving clear directions to a collaborator, the more specific your instructions, the more likely you are to receive a helpful response.
Bowen and Watson (2024) recommend including these key elements:
- Task: What exactly do you want the AI to do? (e.g., brainstorm, summarize, explain, translate, or create)
- Format: What should the response look like? (e.g., lesson plan, email, table, rubric, or presentation outline)
- Voice: What tone or style should the response use? (e.g., professional, conversational, encouraging, concise, or written for a specific audience)
- Context: What background information, examples, constraints, or learning objectives should the AI consider?
Prompt Example
- Task – Draft a discussion prompt.
- Audience – Graduate nursing students.
- Format – A table with three discussion questions.
- Context – Focus on HIPAA compliance and include real-world scenarios.
- Tone – Professional and supportive.
Example Prompts by Category
- Course Design: Create SMART learning objectives for a first-year biology course covering cell division. Align with Bloom's Taxonomy.
- Assignment: Create 10 ideas for college-level assignments in course X that can assess these learning outcomes. Make sure the assignments will be meaningful for students and that the process for doing the work aligns with my goals for the class.
- Assessment: Develop five formative quiz questions aligned with these learning objectives.
- Discussion: Write three discussion prompts that encourage students to apply course concepts rather than simply recall facts.
- Rubric: Create a rubric for a group presentation that includes criteria for collaboration, organization, evidence, and presentation skills.
- Student Communication: Draft a welcoming announcement for the first week of class that encourages students to introduce themselves.
Refine Your Results
Generative AI works best through conversation. Ask follow-up questions, provide more context, and refine your prompts to improve the response. For example:
- Make the language more concise.
- Include accessibility considerations.
- Convert the information into a table.
- Rewrite for graduate students.
Remember to review AI-generated responses for accuracy, completeness, bias, and appropriateness before using or sharing them. Protect privacy and intellectual property when using generative AI. Do not include student records, grades, personally identifiable information (PII), student work, research data, or other confidential or copyrighted university materials in your prompts unless you are using an institutionally approved AI tool that is authorized to process that information.
Learn more about prompting:
- A Guide to Prompting AI (for What it is Worth) - Ethan Mollick (One Useful Thing) article
- More Useful Things: AI Resources Prompt Library – Ready-to-use prompts for teaching, learning, and productivity
- Ready-to-use AI Prompts for Higher Education – Google for Education resources with ideas for administrators, faculty, research, and students
- Strategies for Writing Better Prompts – Google Cloud guide with practical prompting strategies and example
- Teaching with AI Basic Prompting – choose from the dropdown lists for ideas on teaching
- Working with AI: Two Paths to Prompting – Ethan Mollick (One Useful Thing) article
- Wharton Generative AI Labs Prompt Library – Prompt templates organized by purpose.
Related Resources
- Artificial Intelligence at NDSU: Goals, Guidance, and Research (KB 155103) - resources for instructors, students, and research work
- AI Use at NDSU - resources for instructors and students along with the AI policy and tools