Ohio State has made great strides focusing on AI Fluency during this academic year. While much of our progress has focused on the classroom – instructors and students – we don’t want staff members to feel left behind! OTDI has developed several classes, focusing on introductory information and prompting, to enable staff to educate themselves and get started with AI! Of course, instructors and students can also pick up helpful tips from these classes. The new courses are available in BuckeyeLearn – sign up now!
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Start with a brief Introduction to Generative AI. If you are curious about generative AI and how it fits into your work at Ohio State, this quick, 11‑minute introductory course is for you. It demystifies gen AI—showing how it creates text, images, and more—and helps you get started with confidence. You’ll explore real‑world use cases, learn how to write effective prompts, and understand the ethical considerations and limitations of AI, all while discovering where to find trusted support and resources at Ohio State.
AI Prompt Curriculum
To use AI effectively, prompting matters. Clear, well‑crafted instructions help AI focus on what you actually need—delivering more accurate, useful, and trustworthy results while reducing errors and guesswork. Four classes deliver a 76-minute curriculum to make you a prompting expert! Each course is also available individually, outside of the collected curriculum.
- AI Prompts: The Basics of Effective Prompts: There are many ways to use AI tools in your work, including processing documentation, drafting communications, project management, data organization, and streamlining services. When we’re talking about AI tools, a prompt is the instructions you give the AI tool to get the answers you want. When you write effective prompts, you help the AI tool narrow down the information it should use, which can help minimize the risk of incorrect or completely made up information from the AI tool, often called hallucinations.
- AI Prompts: Constraints: Want more consistent, on‑target results from AI? This 16‑minute course shows you how to sharpen your prompts using smart constraints—like tone and personas—to guide AI’s focus, tailor its responses, and get outputs that better match your goals and audience.
- AI Prompts: Few-Shot Prompts: Tackle more complex tasks with confidence using few‑shot prompting—an advanced technique that shows AI exactly what “good” looks like by providing clear examples. In this 22‑minute course, you’ll learn how to structure prompts that improve decision‑making, maintain consistency across large datasets, and deliver more precise results, even for specialized or niche topics.
- AI Prompts: Mitigating Bias: As generative AI becomes part of everyday administrative work, using it responsibly matters more than ever. This 23‑minute course helps you recognize and reduce bias in AI‑generated outputs—so you can use AI more thoughtfully, apply counter‑factual prompting techniques, and ensure your work reflects Ohio State’s mission, values, and commitment to ethical decision‑making.
Looking for more? Don’t forget that Ohio State offers you access to LinkedIn Learning, where you can continue to build your general AI knowledge and take a deeper dive into specific AI tools. You can access LinkedIn Learning classes through BuckeyeLearn, which records completed courses on your transcript.