Practical AI for Higher Ed Faculty
The tool is in the room. Teach like it.
For faculty who have watched the AI question arrive in their courses faster than any policy did. Any discipline, any level, tenured or adjunct. This course does not argue that the tool belongs in your classroom; it assumes it is already there, in every student's pocket, and shows you how to teach, assess, research, and get through the week with that as the starting point.
What it is
Six lessons, each built on something already on your desk: the syllabus, the assignment you are giving next week, the stack of drafts, the literature review, the committee report you are avoiding. Every lesson has real prompt text you can copy and ends with one thing to do before the next one. By the end you have a syllabus statement you could defend, at least one redesigned assignment, a comment bank in your own voice, and a verification habit that will keep a fabricated citation out of your work.
What it is not
It is not a tour of products, and it does not recommend one. Tools change names every few months; the teaching decisions in this course do not. It is not a technical course — nothing in here asks you to understand how any of it works. It is not an argument for or against AI in education; that argument is being had elsewhere and it is not helping you on Tuesday. And it is not a system for detecting students. Detection does not work, it falls hardest on the students least able to absorb a false accusation, and this course spends its time on assignment design instead, which does work.
What you need
- An AI assistant you can already open. Your campus license if there is one — that is the one whose terms your general counsel has read — or a free consumer account if there is not. Any of the major assistants does everything in this course; do not go shopping.
- One document you keep for the whole course. Every prompt you like, every answer worth reusing, and the one-line diagnoses each lesson asks for. By lesson 6 this file is the actual product.
- Your own material, on your desk: one assignment prompt you are giving this term, your current syllabus, your notes on a few papers you have read, the rubric for the next thing you have to grade, and the service task you are most avoiding. Every exercise runs on your own work, never on a student's.
- Your institution's student AI policy, or the confirmed knowledge that there is not one yet, plus a written answer to whether your campus has an agreement covering student work in an AI tool.
- About four hours, in six sittings — each lesson is a short read and a timed exercise on real material.
How to work through it
In order. Lesson 2 sets up a context block every later lesson assumes you have, and lesson 1 ends with a diagnosis you act on in lesson 3. Lessons 4, 5 and 6 can be taken in any order after that, but none of them work without the first three.
Pace it at one lesson a week, done with the exercise; that beats six read on a Sunday. Each lesson opens with a "Before you start" list — gather what it names first, because the exercises run on your own syllabus, assignment and notes, and the lesson stalls without them. Each ends with "Do this now," a ten-to-twenty-minute piece of work with a checkable finish line. If you only ever do those six exercises, you have the course.
Keep two things open: the lesson, and the document you started in lesson 1. Prompts go into that document as you write them, with the edits that made them yours — the version you filled in for your own course is worth more later than the template. Write down the one-line answers each lesson asks for; they are what makes the next lesson quick.
The toolkit page collects every prompt in one place. Use it as a reference after you have worked through a lesson, not as a shortcut past it — a prompt without the judgment around it produces exactly the generic output that makes people give up.
Two rules hold from the first lesson to the last. No student work and nothing confidential — a manuscript under review, a personnel matter, someone else's unpublished draft — goes into a hosted tool. And no citation, quotation, or number comes out of one and into your writing until you have opened the source yourself.
By the end
- you can rewrite a syllabus so the AI question is answered before a student asks it
- you can design assignments and assessments that still measure learning when every student has the tool
- you can use AI as a reading and research assistant without trusting a citation you have not opened
- you can give more and better feedback on student writing in the time you actually have, in your own voice
- you can handle the committee report, the service load, and the inbox in an hour instead of an afternoon
Lessons
- 01What changed and what did not
What the tool is genuinely good at in your discipline, what it cannot do, and the honest version of the integrity problem.
free · 35 min - 02Your teaching context
Write your courses, your discipline's norms, and your institution's policy down once, and stop explaining yourself to a blank box every time.
subscribers · 30 min - 03The syllabus and the assignment
An AI statement students actually understand, and assessments that still measure learning when everyone has the tool.
subscribers · 40 min - 04Reading, research, and the citation you must open
Literature scans, summaries, and a first draft of the review — plus the one verification rule that keeps your name clean.
subscribers · 40 min - 05Feedback at scale
More and better comments on student writing, in your own voice, without a student's words ever leaving your control.
subscribers · 40 min - 06The rest of the job
Committee reports, the letter you owe a student, the reviewer's report, and the inbox — the service load, in an hour instead of an afternoon.
subscribers · 35 min
The toolkit
- kitThe faculty toolkit
Every prompt from the six lessons in finished form and word for word, the documents the course told you to build, the six exercises as a checklist, a one-screen reference, the resources worth keeping, and one invented instructor's first term.
subscribers - fileYour starter file
The one note file the course tells you to keep, already laid out: your context block, every prompt in its slot, the templates, the routine, and the six done-lines as a checklist. Markdown; opens in any notes app.
subscribers