Today’s finish line
Build one teaching artifact you can plausibly use this autumn: an exercise, rubric, assessment set, course page, slide deck, or small package containing several of these.
Morning — the course factory
Begin with a syllabus or a short description of one course. Tell the agent who the students are, what they should learn, and what evidence would convince you that they learned it.
Then ask for a small system rather than a pile of generic content:
- draft assessment questions at named difficulty levels;
- build a grading rubric from the learning outcomes;
- generate a strong, mediocre, and subtly wrong answer;
- grade those answers using the rubric;
- critique the questions and revise the weakest ones.
You are not outsourcing the decision about what students should learn. You are using cheap drafts to examine that decision more closely.
Afternoon — publish, then react
Turn rough notes into something visible. The agent may create a webpage, a slide deck, or both. The first version should arrive quickly; most of the learning is in what happens next.
Try instructions such as:
This is too text-heavy. Keep one argument per screen and move the explanation into speaker notes.
Add a ten-minute pair exercise after the central example. Make the instructions understandable without me in the room.
Make a printable one-page version for students and check that it agrees with the slides.
Build the project, inspect any errors, and repair them.
Notice the difference between generating text and maintaining a collection of related artifacts.
A working bullshit-detection routine
Before shipping:
- Scope: Did the agent use only material it was allowed to use?
- Evidence: Can important factual claims be traced?
- Consistency: Do slides, handouts, rubrics, and answers agree?
- Audience: Is the assumed reader actually your student?
- Inspection: Have you opened the rendered result?
- Responsibility: Would you put your name on it?
Take-home artifact
Use the final block to finish one thing, not begin five things. Ask the agent to
write a short README.md explaining what exists and how to update it later.
Commit a checkpoint with git. The artifact does not have to be perfect. It has to be real, inspectable, and yours.