Training Educators On AI Use

A thesis paper of an undergraduate student was rejected because he was told he had used too much AI to write it, something his college did not allow. ‘I did not know about this,’ he pleaded, ‘I thought it’s ok to use AI.’ The student was made to revise the paper until he could free it to the level of AI influence considered ‘tolerable’ by his college. 

An MPhil student faced embarrassment when his thesis was turned down by his supervisor because, he was told, he was found to be transcribing parts of his research interviews by using AI tools. There must not be an AI influence in your paper at all, he was told by his supervisor. “I had used an AI tool for transcribing the interviews,” the MPhil scholar, who is also an educator, shared. “I was almost perceived as a plagiarist, someone who makes AI do his job. If I had been clearly told, whether, how much, and, if at all, I could use AI in my work, I would have approached my dissertation differently,” he said. “I would not have to face that embarrassment.”

Unwritten policies 

The institutions these students studied under appear to have their own ‘unwritten’ AI policies, which probably were not properly communicated to the students or which probably were (deliberately) misunderstood by the students.  

Be that as it may, these two cases can be taken to represent a situation of the absence of an overarching policy on ethical use of AI, for and by students as well as teachers. Positively, university professors are found to follow their own personal discretion or the policies they may have developed in matters related to whether to allow students to use AI and to what extent.  But even such informal and ‘unofficial’ guidelines appear to be totally absent in case of the teachers teaching high school students, among whom AI use is not less common. 

While the tendency among the students to use AI tools is on the rise, there is nobody to tell them whether they are using it for the right purpose and in the right way because their teachers—the immediate mentors—have little or no idea about it. On their part, teachers themselves have not been told how much they can use AI and how. Alarmingly, there is no nationwide data in AI use—by students and by teachers—in Nepal.  Anecdotal evidence shows students with access to smartphones and computers use them to the point of overreliance. 

So how are teachers supposed to respond to this phenomenon? How are students supposed to use it? How much of it is permissible? How should teachers guide the students on the ethical use of AI? The answers to these questions rest, largely, on policies of individual institutions and/or the discretion of individual educators.  

Ministry of Education’s Centre for Education and Human Resource Development (CEHRD), which is meant to support capacity development of teachers, recognises in its Teacher Competency Framework (2015) that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is a powerful tool for effective teaching and learning, and mentions that a teacher should be competent enough to select and use integrated learning strategies of ICT to facilitate learning, to develop digital materials according to the needs of learners and to adapt and use the available materials, to use ICT to assess and provide feedback on learning, to be familiar with ICT policies in education and developments in digital culture and to demonstrate appropriate professional behaviour, among others. 

The CERHD, however, does not have any policies or guidelines for AI use for teachers. “During teacher training, we tell the teachers what we know about the ethical use of ICT. We have not yet prepared guidelines regarding how to use AI in education. It seems that we must start working on it now,” shared Gauri Shankar Pandey, teacher trainer and director at the CERHD. “We have been working on the ICT front, but have not integrated this with AI yet. We need to do so and make guidelines for teachers and students on how to, when and how best to use AI in the classroom.” 

The much ambitious AI policy unveiled in August, 2025, ‘to promote good governance by integrating AI into existing information technology system, to enhance the quality, accessibility, and efficiency of public service delivery across all three tiers of government in sectors such as agriculture, education, health, industry, finance, public services, and security’ is silent about how school and university teachers will be trained on AI use and who will train them.

Time to codify

Countries like Austria, Japan, Finland, and the UK have guidelines or active curriculum policies regarding AI in schools, while the likes of the US and China have laws and policies governing AI use in higher education. Admittedly, this seems to be a work in progress, for, according to the 2023 UNESCO global survey, less than 10 percent of schools and universities have formal institutional guidance on AI use. There is no reason why Nepali education institutions should continue to remain outside of that 10 per cent data.

As an educator, I devote a considerable amount of my time trying to fathom out how AI is impacting the way we teach and learn.  With limited or no opportunities for exposure and hands-on experience and sharing on how educators elsewhere are rethinking pedagogies or coping with challenges and opportunities created by AI on using instructional technologies in classrooms, lesson planning, and effective teaching, educators in Nepali classrooms have little awareness of the global trends, or may be improvising themselves based on a limited understanding of AI use. 

Nepali educators deserve much better to be able to guide their students much better.  Organisations, national or international, working on education sector in Nepal, could pay some heed to this need for training teachers and students on AI, which is predicted to transform the education system in ways the world has never seen before.  

(The author is a journalist and educator based in Kathmandu.)