Following two UBC surveys on student perceptions and the ways in which students engage with GenAI (2024-25 and 2025-26), UBC developed a faculty survey to better understand faculty perceptions of GenAI and how they are responding to, resisting, and integrating GenAI tools in their teaching practice. The faculty survey was conducted between February 17 and March 9, 2026. It gathered perspectives from across UBC Vancouver and UBC Okanagan, with a total of 491 complete responses.
The survey found a faculty body deeply divided. While some faculty are leveraging GenAI to ease heavy workloads and spark instructional creativity, others view the technology with deep skepticism and as an existential challenge to the core mission of higher education.
In this article, we’ll first look at participant demographics and then explore responses to the questions:
- How do you communicate your expectations around student use of GenAI in your courses (i.e. whether it is prohibited and, if not, how it may be used)?
- Do you use GenAI for any of the following teaching-related activities?
- Why have you chosen not to use GenAI tools for teaching-related activities? What are your main motivations for using GenAI tools for these teaching-related activities? (Participants saw one of these two questions based on whether they indicated they used GenAI for teaching-related activities.)
Participant demographics
The survey captured responses from a representative cross-section of UBC’s teaching community. Participation spanned both campuses, with 410 respondents from UBC Vancouver (UBCV) and 43 from UBC Okanagan (UBCO). The distribution of the 452 participants who specified their appointment was:
| Appointment | Total |
|---|---|
| Educational Leadership Stream | 16% |
| Research Stream | 44% |
| Lecturer | 16% |
| Sessional Instructor | 17% |
| Other faculty appointment | 5% |
| I do not have a faculty appointment | 2% |
Faculty were also asked to specify which disciplinary category best aligned with their teaching. The distribution of the 411 participants who responded to this question was:
| Disciplinary Category | Total |
|---|---|
| Design, Architecture, Creative & Performing Arts | 5% |
| Education, Humanities & Social Sciences | 28% |
| Land, Food & Forestry Sciences | 3% |
| Law & Business | 14% |
| Medicine & Health | 14% |
| Sciences & Engineering (STEM) | 37% |
Communicating Expectations
In the 2025-26 student survey, students were asked if their course instructors clearly communicated expectations around student use of GenAI in their courses. This question found 89% of students reporting these expectations clearly communicated in most or all of their courses, a dramatic increase from the 2024-25 survey where 61% of students indicated they were unclear about whether they could use GenAI in most of their courses
In the faculty survey, faculty were asked the corresponding question “How do you communicate your expectations around student use of GenAI in your courses (i.e. whether it is prohibited and, if not, how it may be used)?” Of the 469 faculty responding, 3% indicated they did not communicate expectations around the use of GenAI to their students. However, the remaining 97% of faculty selected at least one method of communication with many faculty indicating they communicated expectations via multiple methods. All faculty who indicated they communicated their expectations indicated they did so via either a generic statement provided by their unit or via a course specific statement – with some faculty using both approaches. In addition, almost all faculty indicated they discussed their expectations around GenAI with students.
Use of GenAI for Teaching-Related Activities
Faculty were asked to indicate if they used GenAI for teaching related activities and, if so, for what activities. Of the 489 faculty responding to this question, 41% indicated they had not used GenAI tools for teaching-related activities. The decision to not use GenAI for teaching-related activities varied significantly across disciplines with a high of 78% in Design, Architecture, Creative & Performing Arts (followed by 61% in Education, Humanities & Social Sciences) and a low of 20% in Law & Business). The remaining Faculties generally falling within a few percentage points from the average.
Of the 288 faculty who indicated they did use GenAI for teaching-related activities, the following activities were reported from a pre-defined list:
| Activity | Total |
|---|---|
| Creating course materials | 59% |
| Editing and proofreading your own work | 58% |
| Creating assessments (assignments, quizzes, exams, etc.) | 55% |
| Other | 27% |
| Summarizing content (e.g. student posts to discussion boards) | 22% |
| Writing or drafting feedback to students | 18% |
| Responding to and/or managing student emails | 17% |
| Translating content | 11% |
| Assessing student work (grading) | 7% |
Responses to this question reveal a boundary between using GenAI for course preparation and using it for student evaluation. Faculty report widespread use of GenAI as a creative collaborator and administrative assistant, with nearly six in ten using it to create course materials (59%), refine their own writing (58%), and design assessments (55%). However, usage drops sharply when moving from preparation to evaluation with only 7% of faculty entrusting GenAI with grading student work, and less than one-fifth using it to draft feedback for students (18%). This suggests that while faculty are eager to streamline lesson planning and workflow efficiency, they remain firm on keeping human judgment at the center of student-facing assessment.
Motivations for avoiding or using GenAI
Faculty who indicated they had not used GenAI for teaching-related activities were asked to respond to the open-ended question “Why have you chosen not to use GenAI tools for teaching-related activities?” The 177 faculty who responded to this question shared highly passionate and deeply held concerns with the systemic ethical, cognitive, and societal implications of generative AI technologies as well as the quality of AI generated content. Those included:
- Professional Pride — Feeling that outsourcing key educational tasks devalues their vocational expertise, insults students, and reduces the scholarship of teaching to automated task management.
- Accuracy/Quality — Concerns with errors and low-quality outputs (“homogenized slop”), which require more time to fact-check and edit than drafting from scratch.
- Ecological Concerns — Expressing serious concern over the unsustainable demands on water and electricity required to power and cool data centers, creating a direct conflict with UBC’s climate commitments.
- Pedagogical Concerns — Believing that reading, writing, and analytical friction are the exact cognitive processes where learning and critical thinking happen and that bypassing them de-skills students.
- Concerns Related to Social Harms and Bias — Pointing out that LLMs amplify historical stereotypes, concentrate massive capital in tech monopolies, exploit precarious labor, and systematically erase diverse voices.
- IP/Privacy Concerns — Objecting to the unethical foundation of LLMs trained on stolen data (often including the faculty’s own copyrighted research).
Sample quotes from this group include:
“GenAI offers me and my students nothing, because it can do nothing we cannot do better without it, and it directly threatens my core values as an educator and scholar… It is incapable of innovation… because it only regurgitates what is already known.”
“I feel that the use of GenAI in academia is an existential threat to our reason for existing… These tools are being developed (based on stolen data, in a manner that is exacerbating climate catastrophe) and monetized by a group of billionaires who are in the process of successfully overthrowing democracy.”
Faculty members who indicated they used GenAI for teaching-related activities were asked “What are your main motivations for using GenAI tools for these teaching-related activities?” For the 240 faculty who responded to this question, GenAI use tended to focus on the pragmatic, operational benefits of the technology, using it as an assistant to navigate workload demands, spark ideas, and protect evaluation integrity. The top reasons reported include:
- Efficiency/Productivity — Speeding up repetitive administrative tasks, drafting slide decks, and optimizing lesson preparation to manage high student volumes and tight timelines.
- Creativity Booster — Using the technology as a sounding board or conceptual partner to break out of routine thinking and brainstorm novel exam or clicker scenarios. Many faculty specifically mentioned using AI to create assessment questions.
- Content Refinement — Utilizing GenAI as an editor to proofread, correct coding, refine learning materials for clarity, or polish communication to ensure a professional and supportive tone.
Sample quotes from this group include:
“I use genAI to help brainstorm alternative multiple choice answers for iClicker questions in class, or come up with hypothetical scenarios to present in exam questions. It helps me get out of my stale routines.”
“They make creating new materials MUCH faster, which means 1) i have more time for creative work, and 2) i can actually pursue ideas that would formerly have been infeasible.”
In addition, faculty mentioned using GenAI to test the ‘AI resistance’ of assignments and assessments and to model for students where the software hallucinates, fails, or displays bias; teaching critical evaluation and skepticism.
Conclusion
These findings demonstrate that UBC instructors are navigating GenAI through careful, value-driven choices rather than passive adoption or simple resistance to change. Whether using these tools as assistants to manage mounting workload demands or abstaining due to deeply held pedagogical and ethical convictions, faculty remain clear on the importance of keeping human judgment at the centre of their work.
The next article in this series, Faculty Perceptions of Generative AI, explores faculty perceptions of their own proficiency with GenAI, the perceived proficiency of their students, and the role of the university in supporting application to teaching and learn