AI Ready: All Campus Essentials Resources – December
As a participant in the Council of Independent Colleges’ AI Ready Program, All Campus Essentials, Furman has access to an extensive resource library, created specifically to help campus communities understand and navigate AI in their professional contexts. So far, the program has covered four areas of campus: Senior Leadership (August), Admissions and Enrollment (September), Curriculum and Pedagogy (October), and Retention and Student Success (November).For each of these four areas, CIC provides the following:
- A summary PDF that contains an overview of the three live sessions held during that month along with useful links.
- Session materials for each of the three live sessions. These include
- A link to the recording of the webinar
- Slides from the webinar
- A follow-up email
- Links to additional resources
- Bonus materials
If you have an interest in a particular area and want to dive into all of the materials, or even if you just have time to review the summary PDF, you can find the session resources here.
If you don’t have much time, we’ve curated a top resource from each month at the bottom of this page.
There are no sessions scheduled for December, but AI Ready gets rolling again in January with a focus on Administrative Use, which should be valuable to all of us. Watch your email for an invitation to register for the January session!
Top Resources
Senior Leadership (August)
A Road Map for Leveraging AI at a Smaller Institution
This article outlines a practical roadmap for smaller institutions to leverage AI, beginning with foundational work such as data readiness, governance, and staffing, and then moving through five key stages: coordinating, learning, planning and governing, implementing, and reviewing and refining.
Admissions and Enrollment (September)
50-Day AI Plan for College Personnel
Originally designed for Admissions, this 50-day AI practice guide offers quick, practical daily exercises that can help anyone build confidence and fluency with AI. The tasks move from simple brainstorming and rewriting activities to workflow design, data interpretation, and strategic planning, making the plan valuable for faculty and staff across campus who communicate regularly, plan events, analyze information, or support student success. Whether you’re looking to streamline everyday tasks or explore new ways AI might enhance your work, this resource provides a flexible, low-stakes structure for building skills over time.
Curriculum and Pedagogy (October)
As the AI Ready Team states, “This article explores designing assignments that are “un-cheatable” in the age of AI by requiring higher-order thinking skills like creativity and critical analysis. The author argues that instead of trying to prevent AI use, educators should create tasks that leverage AI as a learning tool. Ultimately, the essay concludes that this shift fundamentally changes the role of the educator from a content provider to that of a coach, mentor, and guide who helps students navigate complex problems with new tools.” If you click the link and encounter a page asking if you want to subscribe to the Substack, just choose “no, thanks” to be taken to the article.
Retention and Student Success (November)
CIC Student Success Demonstration
In this resource, Sarah Gibson, Director of the School of Communication, Lipscomb University, and one of the leaders of the AI Ready program, encourages institutions to move beyond dashboards, which simply report what has already happened, and begin using AI to ask smarter questions that generate meaningful, forward-looking insights. She highlights three approaches: using AI to create privacy-safe formulas for tasks like scholarship review, asking targeted questions that help us anticipate and support student needs, and experimenting with autonomous AI tools for risk analysis. Together, these strategies shift us from passive data reporting to more actionable intelligence that can strengthen student success.