Foundations, Literacy & Implementation
Foundations, Literacy & Implementation
Six sessions | September 2026 – April 2027
ITS is introducing a new six-session badge program tailored for F&M staff, designed to foster confidence and proficiency in navigating the current era of technological transition. The program is designed to provide F&M employees a foundational understanding of the applications for and functionality of Artificial Intelligence in both the workplace and the global landscape. By moving from conceptual knowledge to hands-on implementation, participants will learn to safely and effectively integrate AI tools to enhance their workplace efficiency.
At the core of the experience is a hands-on project that you will develop specifically for your department. Working alongside your manager, you will identify a practical target—such as an inefficient bottleneck, a tedious repetitive task, or a universally frustrating workflow—and introduce the concept during Session II in October. Throughout the program, your cohort will collaborate to refine it.
Participants do not need any previous experience, nor are they obligated to attend every live meeting to take part. While achieving the final badge requires completing all program activities, individuals can catch up on missed sessions asynchronously.
SESSIONS:
SESSIONS:
SESSION I — AI Foundations & Tools
Monday, September 21, 2026 9am - 1030am
What AI actually is, how large language models work under the hood. Hands-on: act as a human AI model, try to reverse-engineer a hidden AI rules and get a bottom up understanding of an LLM.
SESSION II — AI Impact & Ethics
Wednesday, October 28, 2026 9am - 1030am
The environmental and economic cost of running AI at scale, the ethics of training on other people's creative work, and F&M's data classification policy — what counts as public, internal, or restricted. Hands-on: an energy-budget tabletop simulation and a training ethics exercise where every source gets challenged.
SESSION III — AI Integration & Limitations
Thursday, November 19, 2026 9am - 1030am
Prompting techniques that actually work, context windows and why long conversations drift, and the three failure modes to watch for: bias, hallucination, and models that agree with you when they shouldn't. Hands-on: fix a bad prompt, map a three-step workflow, and hunt down a hallucinations.
SESSION IV — Practical Applications
Monday, February 1, 2027 9am - 1030am
Learn the tools for real work: NotebookLM for source-grounded research (including audio overviews), Google AI Studio for task automation, and Zoom AI Companion for meeting summaries and catching up on what you missed.
SESSION V — AI Challenge Workshop
Tuesday, March 9, 2027 9am - 1030am
Workshop format. Pick a bottleneck, repetitive task, or creative hurdle in your own department and build an AI solution for it. Participants share techniques as they go. Honest results welcome — "AI wasn't the right tool for this" is a legitimate finding.
SESSION VI — Poster Presentations
Monday, April 12, 2027 9am - 1030am
Present your project as a poster or digital poster: what you built, what worked, what didn't.
Questions? Reach out to Nicholai Best, ITS.
Page updated
Report abuse