IIT Kanpur, BHU and CSJMU Join Hands to Chart the Role of AI in Teaching, Assessment and Ethics

Three of Uttar Pradesh’s leading higher education institutions have come together to confront one of the most pressing questions facing campuses today: how should artificial intelligence be used in teaching, learning and assessment?

The Centre for Educational Research and Teaching Excellence (CERTEX) at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT Kanpur) hosted a workshop on “AI in Higher Education” in collaboration with Banaras Hindu University (BHU), Varanasi, and Chhatrapati Shahu Ji Maharaj University (CSJMU), Kanpur, bringing faculty from the three institutions onto a common platform to share practices, concerns and ideas.

Leadership sets the tone

The workshop opened with addresses by IIT Kanpur Director Prof. Manindra Agrawal, BHU Vice-Chancellor Prof. Ajit Chaturvedi, CSJMU Vice-Chancellor Prof. Vinay Pathak and CERTEX Professor-in-Charge Prof. Manoj K. Harbola, signalling that AI adoption in classrooms is now a leadership-level priority rather than a matter left to individual teachers.

The organisers noted that while many faculty members have already begun experimenting with AI tools on their own, approaches vary widely from one classroom to the next. The workshop was designed to move that conversation from isolated experiments towards shared understanding and inter-university collaboration.

Three themes: classroom, assessment and ethics

Deliberations were structured around three themes: AI in the Classroom, Assessment in the Age of AI and Ethics in AI. The format favoured open dialogue, with two 45-minute open-mic sessions followed by a one-hour panel discussion, giving participants about two and a half hours of interaction.

The planning committee was convened by Dr Aditya Jagannatham of CERTEX and included Dr Manoj K. Harbola and Dr C. S. Upadhyay (CERTEX), Dr Rajat Mittal (Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur), Dr Sana Khanum (Chemical Engineering, IIT Kanpur), Dr Vimal Singh (Education, CSJMU), Dr Manjari Gupta (Computer Science, BHU) and Dr Prateek Chaurasia (Education, BHU).

Why it matters

The exercise comes as Indian universities rethink their rules for generative AI, from how assignments are designed to whether AI can be used in examinations. A cross-institutional forum of this kind, linking an IIT with a central university and a large state university, offers a practical model for building common norms on responsible AI use, faculty readiness and assessment integrity, in line with the technology-enabled learning goals of the National Education Policy 2020.

For educators across the state, the message from Kanpur is clear: AI is already in the classroom, and the next step is to use it thoughtfully, fairly and with a clear sense of what students must still learn to do on their own.