Building AI literacy for faculty with a semester-long hybrid course

Companies are educating their own employees to increase their AI literacy skills and looking to hire recent graduates who are AI literate as well. Colleges of business, then, must in turn, increase faculty AI literacy in order to produce industry-acceptable graduates. Many faculty development efforts with AI sessions and workshops include AI ethics as well as a focus on AI in the classroom. This paper presents a higher-level semester-long course that focuses on AI theory, agents and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) especially when used with deep research applications. Originally, the last third of the the course was to include AI application development but faculty from multiple disciplines balked at learning Python to develop applications. The seminar pivoted to focus on developing research and pedagogical agents with a focus on developing pedagogical applications. Given the varying level of technical proficiency among faculty, the course will continue with modifications in the next academic year.