AI Deep Dive: AI-Infused Curriculum and Program Design

Primary Audience: Deans, curriculum committee leaders, CTL staff, faculty champions, academic technology leaders

AI literacy can’t be bolted onto a curriculum as a single course and called done — it has to be woven through programs in ways that respect how each discipline actually teaches and assesses. This session takes its frame from Pierre Lévy’s four-pole model of learning: teacher guidance, the student’s own developing memory, dialogue with peers, and AI as the interface to accumulated knowledge. The point isn’t to add AI as a fifth pole the curriculum was never designed around; it’s to design the AI pole deliberately so the other three survive intact. That reframes the work from “embed AI competencies in learning outcomes” to something sharper — a design test every AI-infused assignment should pass: does it preserve all four poles, or does it quietly let the AI pole crowd out personal memory and peer dialogue? Most of this work sits at Tier 1 (drafting, summarizing, design support), which makes curriculum a good place to build fluency before the stakes rise in operations or compliance.

As a worked example, the session will demonstrate a Course Vault — an RMAI architectural pattern for a faculty-authored, bounded knowledge environment in which the AI is constrained to authoritative course material the instructor selects and governs, rather than reaching silently into the open web. The Vault makes Lévy’s “AI pole” concrete: the faculty member authors the system prompt, which is the pedagogy made legible in text they can read, edit, and own; the conversation between student and Vault becomes a newly assessable artifact, exposing the process of thinking that a finished product alone conceals. This session is demonstration-driven — nothing to install. Participants will leave with a design test they can apply to their own courses and a concrete sense of what it looks like to design the AI engagement a student will have, rather than ignore it, prohibit it, or accept whatever the student improvises.