Over the past 2 years or so, I’ve spent a lot of time collecting information on the use of generative AI (genAI) for academics. And I’ve done loads of experimentation with different language models, exploring all the ways that they might be useful to support academics in their scholarship.
And I’ve finally had the time to distil that collection of information into a short introductory course on genAI for academics.
The aim of the course is to help busy academics develop a practical understanding of how to integrate genAI into their academic workflow.
Specific objectives are to:
- Write structured prompts to enhance the quality of genAI outputs.
- Engage more deeply with genAI as a reading companion.
- Write more effectively using genAI as a writing coach.
- Create academic content with genAI.
- Learn more effectively using genAI as a tutor.
There are a few caveats:
- This is a short course and should take no more than a few hours to complete, alongside all the lesson activities. If you’re looking for a deep dive into something comprehensive, then this is not for you.
- It’s aimed to be immediately useful, and so has very little content to pad out the lessons. In other words, this course is not for academics wanting to learn about genAI, it’s for academics wanting to learn how to use genAI.
- The audience for this course is ‘busy academics’; people who work in higher education who are looking for ways to use AI to support their scholarly work. If that’s not you, then this may not be what you’re looking for.
- There’s a lot that’s missing from this course, including guidance on using AI for research, multimodality (this course deals almost exclusively with working in text), and a range of other relevant topics. I am working on additional courses that will explore those items in more detail.
The course will be available through Head space in a couple of days, and I’ll be sending out an announcement via the newsletter. If you want to get a notification when it’s available, please sign up at the link above.
Note: This course is different to the Generative AI for Physiotherapists course that I’m creating with Physiopedia.