ACS Program: The AI Sessions | Associated Colleges of the South

Practical Strategies and Real Understanding for Working with AI

The AI Sessions is a six-episode series on working with generative AI in the daily work of a liberal arts campus, created by faculty and staff from Berea College, Rhodes College, the University of Richmond, and Washington and Lee University.

Each episode is offered two ways: as a live virtual workshop for ACS member institutions, and as a set of short stand-alone video modules of 10 to 15 minutes each, available anytime a specific need arises. Start anywhere; no module assumes you have seen another. The aim is not to sell AI adoption but to build the skill and judgment to decide when, how, and whether these tools belong in your own work.

Please click on each category to expand it.

What Participants Will Take Away

What Participants Will Take Away

By the end of the series, participants will be able to:

● Explain what large language models actually do, anticipate where they fail, and match review effort to the stakes of the task.
● Decide whether a task is appropriate for AI at all, and for which tool, given data sensitivity, FERPA obligations, and institutional policy.
● Apply AI to a real workflow in their own role, from course design and assessment to advising, scholarship, and administrative work.
● Build and test a basic AI-supported tool, such as a custom assistant, a RAG-based tutor, or a lightweight web app, with appropriate guardrails.

Episodes and Topics

Episodes and Topics
Mondays, 3-4:30 pm. EST on Zoom

● October 5 – Getting Started with AI
What AI actually is (and isn’t), the tool landscape, key vocabulary, effective prompting, and the habits that keep AI’s confident mistakes from becoming yours. Includes a companion module on getting your digital files in order before you prompt.
● October 26 – Course Design & Assessment with AI
Working through course design phase by phase, deciding which tasks to hand to AI, which to share, and which to keep fully human; plus assessment approaches that respond to what AI has done to traditional signals of student learning.
● November 16 – Tutoring & Advising with AI
Examines several approaches to AI in support of student learning and advising, including course-specific tutors, student success coaches, academic planning assistants, and workflows built with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and AI agents. Some may be genuinely helpful; others may create more problems than they solve. This episode asks where these tools add value and where human judgment remains indispensable, with privacy, FERPA compliance, and reliability in view throughout.
● February 15 – Scholarship and AI
Organizing research materials, questioning a body of sources with RAG-based tools, and persistent AI workspaces that let recurring scholarly work pick up where it left off, without giving up the researcher’s own reading and judgment.
● March 15 – Everyday Workflows with AI
How a non-programmer can build small purpose-built tools such as trackers, reviewers, and dashboards, and how to design a bot or agent with one clear job and test it before anyone is asked to trust it.
● April 12 – Privacy & Security in the Age of AI
A defense-in-depth approach to data exposure, permissions, and prompt injection. Written guardrails are only one layer of protection; this episode covers the rest, from access controls to testing and monitoring.

Facilitators

Facilitators

Miriam Clinton, Chair of Archaeology and Assoc. Prof. of Art and Art History at Rhodes College
Harvey Smith, Chief Information Officer at Rhodes College
Rob Smith, Executive Director of Institutional Effectiveness and Accreditation and Assoc. Prof. of Psychology at Berea College
JT Torres, Dir. of the Harte Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington and Lee University
Lauren Tilton, E. Claiborne Robins Prof. of Liberal Arts and Digital Humanities and Chair of Rhetoric & Communication Studies at University of Richmond

Please register below. Please contact Shiree Williams at swilliams@acsouth.edu with questions.

Explore more