Faculty Guidance: Preparing for the ChatGPT Edu Rollout in Spring 2026

Dear Colleagues,

As announced in November 2025, USC will provide faculty, staff, and students with access to ChatGPT Edu, an institutionally supported platform for using and exploring generative AI. Access will be available later this week, with a HIPAA-compliant workspace for Keck Medicine of USC launching shortly after. The campus-wide launch gives our community access to this powerful tool while enhancing security to protect USC data and assets. Faculty should expect additional communications, including information on how to access ChatGPT Edu, options for migrating existing accounts, and details on how to sign up for training or to obtain support. Today’s message is specifically to provide guidance for your Spring 2026 course planning as you finalize syllabi ahead of classes.

The availability of ChatGPT Edu will introduce new opportunities for teaching, learning, and research, while also raising important questions related to course expectations, assessment, and academic integrity. The guidance below is intended to help you prepare your Spring 2026 courses with clear, practical direction on how – or whether – to incorporate these tools when they become available. Nothing in this guidance introduces new instructional requirements for faculty; it is intended to support individual instructional decisions.

• Faculty remain in control of policies around AI in their classes, provided those policies comply with all University requirements. Instructors are not required to use ChatGPT Edu or any other AI tool in their teaching, research, or service. Faculty are also empowered to establish the rules they judge most appropriate for student use of these tools in the classroom. 
• You are encouraged to be explicit about your expectations regarding use of AI tools by students in completing their coursework. It is highly recommended that you state your AI policy prominently on your syllabus and draw attention to it at the start of the course to avoid confusion. Faculty should leverage policy language from the USC syllabus template to aid in explicitly stating their expectations around AI usage for students. Guidance can also be found at USC’s Office of Academic Integrity site.
• Students are likewise not required to use generative AI tools unless a specific assignment explicitly calls for it.

Please be aware that no generative AI tool is fully digitally accessible. If you are considering incorporating ChatGPT Edu or other generative AI tools into your teaching and have students with alternative media accommodations, please reach out to OSAS to identify ways to remediate those challenges. 

Additional details

• Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Personal Health Information (PHI), protected student records, or other sensitive data should not be shared with any AI tool. 
• ChatGPT Edu is not a monitoring tool. Faculty cannot view students’ chat history, prompts, uploads, or usage patterns. Likewise, individual faculty members’ own chats and uploads are not visible to other instructors, departments, or administrators.
• Under USC’s agreement with OpenAI, prompts and outputs generated in the USC ChatGPT Edu workspace are excluded from model training and are not used to improve OpenAI’s foundation models.

Faculty are encouraged to engage with Center of Excellence in Teaching (CET)’s AI in Education: A Resource Hub for guidance and examples from USC faculty to support decisions about whether and how to integrate AI into courses. CET will also offer AI in Education Institutes, providing faculty opportunities to explore instructional approaches, develop or refine assignments and policies, and consider student-facing expectations related to AI use. 

We also recognize that faculty perspectives on generative AI reflect a wide range of experiences, questions, and priorities. We encourage you to share your input through USC’s AI Strategy Committee survey, which will help inform future guidance, resources, and programming related to AI in teaching and learning.

The purpose of today’s message is to clarify what ChatGPT Edu is – and is not – while ensuring that you have the information needed to decide whether and how these tools fit into your teaching. Appropriate uses of generative AI will vary by discipline, course, and instructional context. This message marks the start of an ongoing process. Additional communications, guidance, conversations, and optional training opportunities will follow. Faculty perspectives will continue to inform this work, and we encourage you to engage with upcoming resources and discussions as shared understanding continues to evolve.

Thank you for contributing to a thoughtful and collaborative approach to AI at USC.

Sincerely,