Guide is designed for students, teachers to promote AI literacy
As professors and students prepare for another semester in a higher education landscape increasingly impacted by artificial intelligence, some are turning to a new student guide to artificial intelligence.
Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center recently published a Student Guide to Artificial Intelligence. Mustafa Akben, director of artificial intelligence integration at Elon University, said he sees AI as a fundamentally just system, but the way students integrate AI into their learning determines how it impacts them.
“There is no good or bad AI. There is a way that you can use AI in a good or bad way,” Akben said. “And I believe there is a good way and a bad way that students can utilize these tools.”
He said this is why student input is crucial in research and guidance about AI use.
“Whatever you come up with, AI is moving very fast and AI should be discussed with the whole stakeholders,” Akben said. “I’m not very in favor of the idea, ‘Let’s put the policies and guidance top down.’ I’m more in favor of the idea that we need a dialogue with our students.”
Elon University leaders, with input from scholars around the world, first presented a statement of principles guiding higher institutions through emerging artificial intelligence technologies in October 2023 at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum in Kyoto, Japan.
One of six foundational principles in the statement was that people, not technology, must be at the center of higher institutions. Special assistant to the president Dan Anderson says that this message is still at the core of Elon’s AI guidance.
“Elon is a very hands-on place and a very student-centered place,” Anderson said. “Right from the beginning, the fact that we chose a student guide to AI is very much in keeping with our culture, with our mission, to stay student-focused.”
The original statement evolved into Elon’s first Student Guide to Artificial Intelligence in August 2024. The guide served as a straightforward introduction to what AI is and how to use it, and promoted AI literacy when large language models were just becoming mainstream.
The second edition, published in May 2025, contained more comprehensive information about artificial intelligence and discussed emerging ethical concerns. According to Anderson, students, faculty and staff at about 4,000 schools across 180 countries have downloaded the guide, which is offered for free under creative commons licensing.
The most recent edition, titled “Human Wisdom for the Age of AI: A Field Guide to Cultivating Essential Skills,” was released in May 2026 and is the third guide to AI Anderson is the lead author and explained this edition focuses less on how to use AI and more on what increasing AI use means for humanity
“We know that AI is being used by nearly <a href="https://aitoday7.com/openai-is-building-ai-agents-for-everything-will-everyone-use-them/” title=”OpenAI is building AI agents for everything. Will everyone use them?”>everyone in higher education at this point,” Anderson said. “The question is, how are we going to use it and not degrade our own human capabilities? How can we use it to further and extend our education, but not enfeeble ourselves by assigning over some of the basic human capabilities?”
The guide draws from 10 voices across history and cultures — such as Aristotle, Cicero and Descartes — to identify human capacities and why those skills matter in the age of AI. For example, one page identifies storytelling as a human skill exemplified by Aristotle through his persuasion triangle, and a target of AI concerns for potentially preventing creativity. The guide discusses how AI may be able to provide facts and logical reasoning, but only humans can contribute personal and emotional experiences.
“I hope that our students are going to utilize it in their development of AI literacy and use it to benefit themselves and understand it’s not only telling AI what to do, but bringing these human ingenuity and skill sets to the table,” Akben said.
Anderson also said maintaining inherently human skills is crucial to using AI effectively. He said teachers have a responsibility to help students develop curiosity, critical thinking, creativity and communication skills that cannot be learned from AI.
“The only way you could help students develop those human skills is to do it through intentional instruction and activities and practice,” Anderson said. “You’re not going to just learn these things through osmosis. You actually have to practice them and do them.”
Exploring the human impact of emerging technologies is not new to Elon faculty. Janna Anderson founded the Imagining the Digital Future Center — then the Imagining the Internet Center — in 2000 to analyze thousands of projections of the positive and negative impacts of the internet.
“For more than 25 years we have been surveying and interviewing experts to gather their hopes and fears, holding a mirror up to our world to help us better understand the impact of the technology that has gradually insinuated itself into our lives to a point at which it seems we cannot thrive without it,” Janna Anderson wrote in a statement to Elon News Network. “We examine how we are changing as our tools change.”
Janna Anderson said the research naturally turned to AI and students’ and professors’ desire for guidance.
“Our surveys and canvassings of experts for their input are our primary work – through these we also saw the great need for digital literacy education, thus the Student Guides became another extremely important aspect of what we do,” Janna Anderson said in a statement.
According to Akben, students now want to learn how to use AI in an effective, ethical and responsible way. He worked with Dan Anderson to incorporate student and faculty feedback in the most recent edition.
Human Wisdom for the Age of AI includes teacher’s guide learning modules with group exercises, worksheets and discussion questions, and a self-assessment tool for students to reflect on how reliant they are on AI in their studies.
“All of us in humanity are trying to learn about these technologies as they evolve in real time,” Anderson said. “We’re producing materials that I think are useful for everybody at whatever level they are at in their own AI education.”
Dan Anderson said he hopes students, particularly incoming freshmen, will download the most recent student guide and use it as a re
“There’s so much, especially for new students, to digest and to know about when they start,” Dan Anderson said. “They could easily miss this, and I think it’s just important that people find out about it.”
