Lingering Guilt and Cautious Adoption: Examples of Post-Secondary Instructors’ Perception of Generative Artificial Intelligence

Instructors play a unique role in today's university setting, straddling the line between practicing teachers and professors in academia, specifically in the College of Education. This perspective helps bridge the gap between academic professors and practicing teachers in public schools. Therefore, we investigated five instructors' experiences with generative artificial intelligence (genAI) to better understand its effects on today's teachers. While their experiences with genAI varied slightly, the exploratory study highlights the instructors' progress from initial skepticism and experimentation to evaluation, reflection on emotional response, and, finally, cautious adoption. We present this data not to generate generalizable results, but to show how instructors use these tools and how they respond to the development of this technology. Here, we present their stories to understand their experiences.

AI, GenAI, Instructors, Negative Emotions

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