Tool: AI Prompting Guide

A guide for institutional leaders, faculty, and staff to effectively and responsibly engage with AI.

Artificial intelligence tools are becoming everyday companions in higher education, shaping how we learn, teach, and work. Yet, the quality of what these tools produce depends heavily on how we communicate with them. Crafting effective prompts (the instructions we give to an AI system) is a core skill for unlocking value while ensuring responsible use.

Based on our research with institutional leaders, many colleges and universities are still at early stages of AI adoption, where experimentation is driven by individuals rather than coordinated strategy. This hesitancy was partially due to a lack of knowledge and confidence. Faculty and staff often lack comprehensive training on how to effectively use AI tools, leading to shallow implementation in classrooms and student services or, in some cases, not engaging at all. This results in missed opportunities: those closest to student learning and institutional operations are also those best positioned to identify innovative solutions, yet without AI literacy they cannot fully leverage these tools.