AI WORKSHOPS – 1 or 2-PART SERIES (2 x 90m)
All of the workshops below can stand alone as 90-120 minute sessions, but there are some better combinations.
Teaching with AI Workshop (One Broad Workshop)
This practical session will help you discover what AI can do (lit reviews, searching for ideas, grant applications, expanding perspectives, accreditation reports, student support and faster grading.) All assignments are now AI assignments, so we will consider a broad range of new assignment techniques (including writing). Understanding which tasks will need human quality will be critical for new curriculum and engaging students; we can and must both reduce cheating and raise standards. We will explore a wide variety of new assignment designs including AI custom bots. Bring a laptop and to learn how AI could improve your work-flow and teaching, while giving you more time for the rest of your life.
Everyone should bring a laptop. See below for individual workshops focused on single topics.)
Longer is better and this splits easily into two webinars or workshops (90-120 minutes each). The first part is equally suited to staff. And the second part can be tailored to different disciplines or groups.
- Working with AI: Tools & Techniques
AI Literacy begins with knowing which AI tool to use but then requires asking better questions and evaluating responses: extensions of the critical writing and thinking skills we already teach and value. AI prompts need human context, but AI also has new capabilities: AI can search for ideas and expand perspectives. Prompting is not engineering; prompting is writing. In this interactive workshop, you will get to practice lots of techniques on a wide variety of rapidly-evolving AI tools. Our goal is to get a realistic understanding of how AI is already changing human work and thinking and how you might begin to use it to improve your research and teaching.
- We will explore how AI is changing work and thinking and how we can ensure all of our students are prepared for the future.
- We will develop skill using various AI tools.
- We will practice with AI tools that might help with faculty tasks.
- Teaching with AI: From Cheating to Creative Assignments
This practical session will start with the implications of how AI is changing average and its implications for grading, cheating and policy. We will examine how we can design assignments that will motivate students to do the hard work only they can do: AI can now customize every assignment to increase the motivation and effort of every individual student. We will discover how AI can create materials and will create design activities, simulations and a tutor bot that can support student learning without providing answers. Our most important goal, however, is to create assignments that foster and protect critical thinking and human agency while also raising standards.
- We will explore the implications of AI cheating, detection and policies.
- We will consider how AI help or hurt equity and inclusion on our campus.
- We will create new assignments and student support bots with AI.
- We will learn how to create and use custom bots.
AI COMPLETE SERIES (3, 4 or 5 x 90m)
Here is a longer series that works well as webinars: https://genai.calstate.edu/webinars It works as a 3, 4 or 5 part series. Everyone will need a laptop or device to practice.
1. Thinking and Working with AI
AI is already changing human work and thinking. AI is a new form of labor and you and your students will now always be an AI boss. AI Literacy, however, involves two staples of higher education: asking better questions and evaluating answers. This workshop explores AI bias, the range of models (that includes dozens of different regional and cultural models) and what new capabilities (like searching for ideas) means for what AI can do for you. It is critical to determine for which tasks it is useful and for which it is not. Equally, humans will need to understand where human expertise remains essential and when and how human skills make AI responses better.
2. Tools, Emotions, Agents & Beyond
To understand the AI ecosystem, possibilities and threats, we also need some understanding of the thousands of other AI and API tools designed to search only published research, support neurodivergent students, respond emotionally or clone your voice. We will examine how system prompts and a course profile can expand perspectives, predict responses and help you customize at scale. New agents, browsers and stackable skills, far surpass what chatbots can do. They can design and deploy an interactive simulation for your students, give oral exams, or organize your research files, but they can also complete online assignment. Practicing with these rapidly-evolving tools will help us determine which tasks might be done better with AI and where we must preserve human judgement and expertise.
3. Teaching with AI: Customization, Writing & Reflection
Prompting is writing. We can create a wide range of new writing assignments that both use AI and challenge students to do better work than they could without AI. If an AI can produce consistent average and customized work than we need to update our policies around grading: why would an employer hire a “C” student if AI can do that level of work? We will examine how AI might help us improve our teaching, enhance critical thinking, increase student reflection and explore new post-AI writing assignments.
4. AI Assignments and Custom Bots
All assignments are now AI Assignments. In the same way that the ease of finding information on the internet forced faculty to rethink what homework students did and how we wanted them to do it, we will all need an AI strategy for assignments. We will focus on how we can create assignments that foster and protect critical thinking and human agency while also raising standards. We will learn how to create and use custom bots and through a wide diversity of examples, explore how we can redesign to reduce cheating and prepare students for a new world of AI-assisted work.
5. AI Grading, Assessments, Course Design and Strategy
Could AI tutors or grading allow us to design better assignments and assessments?. We will explore how to use AI for feedback and grading for both traditional and alternative assessments and how AI could improve rubrics, course design and especially accreditation. We will also consider our next steps and how to affect an AI strategy in our departments or campus.
ADDITIONAL AI TOPICS
These are additional and more focused workshops. They do assume some prior AI literacy and these topics are all covered above, perhaps in less detail.
Build a Bot
Customized bots can be used as tutors, moderators, role-play partners and customized student or assignment support. AI can also evaluate and provide feedback within these chats which makes them a powerful new form of assignment themselves. You can create a custom bot simply by sending a prompt to students, but using the prompt to create a custom bot (especially in a secure platform) provides more security and students then have to work in the platform (where you can see all of the chats). You can customize them by student and even use a meta-prompt to create them! This interactive workshop will provide you with the information and time to build a custom bot (or two) for your class and give you new ways to think about how you might deploy them more broadly.
Thinking and Creativity with AI (For general audiences.)
AI is already changing how humans work, communicate, love, shop, and how we find and verify information. AI is a new form of labor (and you will now be an AI boss). This will change our lives, but how AI is changing creativity and human thinking may present a more profound challenge to what it means to be human. How can AI both be the fastest change to writing in human history and the technology that most requires writing (prompting) to use it well? AI could make most humans more creativity, partly because AI can customize at scale. You might not mind replacing generic greeting cards with personalized print and send on demand cards, but this will raise standards for all human creativity (that is generally intended for a wider audience than one.
Redesigning Online Courses for the Age of AI
Creating good online courses has always required new pedagogy, but AI has exposed some of the flaws in our previous pedagogy. Could we now use AI to redesign online courses to reduce cheating and increase learning? Beyond new assignments that require a higher standard that neither human or AI alone could reach, we can also build and deploy customized bots as tutors, moderators, role-play partners, customized support and even as the assignment or assessment itself. Building bot is no more technical than sending email: the real work is in the critical thinking and design that guides the behavior. Building bots can also be a student assignment. This workshop will help you think about new assignment, support and course design.
Using AI Agents to Build Online Games and Tools for Students
You are a good prompter and you have used AI to create images or video, but you want to move beyond the bot. This workshop will explore how AI agents can do things for you: find, organize and download pdfs of articles, or create, code and deploy interactive games, assignments and exams.
AI Feedback and Role-Playing
Feedback is essential for learning and the best feedback is like a tennis net: objective, immediate and specific. AI makes customized and immediate feedback available for every student.: submit your code/story/lab report/business plan to an AI and ask it to find all of the security breaches/inconsistencies/loopholes/unforeseen problems. It is now easier to experiment, visualize and see implications of new ideas. In this workshop, we will learn how even very simple prompts can return useful feedback, how to use AI feedback to make student (and faculty) work better and even how to set up students to get support or have direct conversations or debates with tutors, editors, analysts, historical figures and more. AI can supply the early feedback needed to improve student work and allow them to surpass what AI can do.
AI and Writing: Raising the Bar
Writing has always been assisted by technology: erasers, typewriters, and computers all changed process and how writing is a form of thinking. How do we prepare students for a new era of AI-assisted writing? Is prompt-writing also writing? The rise of spelling and grammar checking changed grading and allowed more focus on style and content and AI could do the same. There are still ways to help students learn to write without AI, but we need to be intentional about process and version history. At the same time, writing with AI creates a need to raise the bar on quality.
AI Literacy for Assessment & Accreditation
AI can make your work better and easier if (1) you understand which tasks need you and which can be done by AI and (2) you understand enough about how AI works to get it to do the work you want it to do. This practical session will focus first on AI literacy and prompting: AI is not like other technological tools. An AI is not like a human but treating it like an extremely naïve intern will dramatically improve your results. Small changes in your prompts can have large results. We will also focus on specific grading, assessment and accreditation tasks, like getting an AI to summarize student narratives about their learning or assessing thousands of assignments against a rubric.
A.I. Leadership and Strategy
Every campus now needs an AI strategy that goes beyond increasing efficiency. AI can improve quality, speed and even work happiness by outsourcing tedious tasks, but it is also a better listener and can improve student support, meeting notes and assessment.
The full package includes 3 workshops over 3-4 hours, but I will also do them individually in 60-90m chunks.
1. What Can AI Really Do?
Previous technology mostly reduced the time needed for specific tasks, but AI also offers a considerable expansion of capabilities. It is hard to discuss AI strategy without a deeper understanding of how AI can search for ideas, analyze data, customize, simulate scenarios, expand perspectives, simulate emotions and predict consumer/human behavior. Many of these topics are covered in the tools and techniques workshop above, but this version is tailored for business and administration.
2. Micro-Strategy
Every campus needs a CLEAR culture that encourages and supports safe AI experimentation and implementation:
- Controls: building trust with safe tools and data, governance and guardrails.
- Learning: creating training for experimentation, curiosity, limits and ethics
- Examples: sharing ideas and department-specific work-flow trials.
- Adoption: supporting a culture of feedback, failure, and change.
- Reviews: testing for benefits and harm with mechanisms for reporting and iteration.
This workshop explores the ways AI might be used to (1) streamline administrative tasks and workflow with examples from many campuses about financial aid, scheduling, budget forecasting, compliance, transfer of credits, social media monitoring, decision making and much more. We will also look at examples for (2) how to support people and culture: bias, equitable decision making, student support, assessment and innovation. Improving decision making, efficiency, work-flows and capacity should be your new baseline strategy.
3. Macro-Strategy
Real strategy is the art of sacrifice. What will you prioritize and how will you allocate scarce resources? This means thinking beyond efficiency to look at new competition and new possibilities. What new (perhaps hyper-customized) services, courses or degrees could you now offer? Typically strategy required choosing between low cost (which sacrifices non-conforming customers, think Walmart) and differentiation (where you can charge more for a distinctive product with deep customer loyalty, think Apple). AI, however, offers new possibilities for services or degrees that are both customized and low cost or scalable.) This workshop is designed to help you make the hard choices now required.
MORE AI STRATEGY WORKSHOPS
AI Strategy for Universities
Like previous technologies, AI can improve quality and speed of some tasks. But AI also offers a significant expansion of capabilities, Could the ability to both customize and scale create new opportunities for services or support? Every campus needs a CLEAR culture that encourages and supports safe AI experimentation and implementation:
- Controls: building rust with safe tools and data, governance and guardrails.
- Learning: creating training for experimentation, curiosity, limits and ethics
- Examples: sharing ideas and department-specific work-flow trials.
- Adoption: supporting a culture of feedback, failure, and change.
- Reviews: testing for benefits and harm with mechanisms for reporting and iteration.
This workshop explores the ways AI might be used to (1) streamline administrative tasks and workflow with examples from many campuses about financial aid, scheduling, budget forecasting, compliance, transfer of credits, social media monitoring, decision making and much more. We will also look at examples for (2) how to support people and culture: bias, equitable decision making, student support, assessment and innovation. You need an AI strategy that goes beyond increasing efficiency: your campus should now be able to improve decision-making, support new services and build capacity.
Preparing Your AI Strategy
AI offers your campus much more than a chance to increase efficiency or reduce staff. Strategy is about improving your odds for success and now is the time to ask what new service or support we now offer. We will get hands-on experience of how AI is changing work and thinking. AI can improve quality, speed and even work happiness by outsourcing tedious tasks, but it is also a better listener and can improve student support, meeting notes and assessment. We will learn how to create fine-tuned AIs that can do specific tasks (like financial aid). AI is also changing average: you will need to consider both when good is good enough and where humans need to focus. AI makes almost everyone more creative by surpassing human ability for quantity of new ideas—the most important phase of innovation. How will you change your processes and culture to leverage these new capabilities?
Working with AI (Staff Focus)
This introduction begins with which AI tool to use and how to think about tasks and prompting. AI prompts need to provide more human context and be more literal than the ones we tend to use with a search engine. Since AI uses natural human language, it also needs human-level communication precision: prompt as if you were talking to smart but naïve interns. Prompting is not at all like engineering. In this interactive workshop, you will get to practice lots of techniques on a wide variety of rapidly-evolving AI tools. Our goal is to get a realistic understanding of how AI is already changing human work and thinking and how you might begin to use it to improve your own work.
See planning or abstracts for a complete list.
Size
There is no limit to size, especially for initial introductions, but we should discuss your needs. Often workshop facilitation in smaller groups can be done with your existing teaching and learning staff.