The Essentials of AI for Life and Society: A Full-Scale AI Literacy Course Accessible to All

TL;DR

This paper describes the development and expansion of a university-wide AI literacy course into a comprehensive, accessible, and interactive three-credit class emphasizing ethics, real-world applications, and student engagement, with positive feedback and freely available materials.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable, accessible AI literacy course with innovative flipped classroom design, ethics integration, and real-world problem assignments, expanding prior limited offerings.

Findings

High student engagement and positive feedback.

Effective integration of ethics and real-world applications.

Course materials are freely available for adaptation.

Abstract

In Fall 2023, we introduced a new AI Literacy class called The Essentials of AI for Life and Society (CS 109), a one-credit, seminar course consisting mainly of guest lectures, which was open to the entire university, including students, staff, and faculty. Building on its success and popularity, this paper describes our significant expansion of the course into a full-scale three-credit undergraduate course (CS 309), with an expanded emphasis on student engagement, interactivity, and ethics-related components. To knit together content from the guest lecturers, we implemented a flipped classroom. This model used weekly asynchronous learning modules--integrating pre-recorded expert lectures, collaborative readings, and ethical reflections--which were then unified by the course instructor during a live, interactive discussion session. To maintain the broad accessibility of the material (no prerequisites), the course introduced substantive, non-programming homework assignments in which students applied AI concepts to grounded, real-world problems. This work culminated in a final project analyzing the ethical and societal implications of a chosen AI tool. The redesigned course received overwhelmingly positive student feedback, highlighting its interactivity, coherence, and accessible and engaging assignments. This paper details the course's evolution, its pedagogical structure, and the lessons learned in developing a core AI literacy course. All course materials are freely available for others to use and build upon.