AI for Professional Work: Designing a Professional Certificate Course in Applied AI
Faculty Mentor
Travis Masingale
Presentation Type
Poster
Start Date
4-14-2026 11:30 AM
End Date
4-14-2026 1:30 PM
Location
PUB NCR
Primary Discipline of Presentation
Design
Abstract
Eastern Washington University's Professional and Continuing Education department identified a need for AI-focused course material for working professionals. AI for Professional Work was developed in response - a five-week professional certificate course that teaches participants how to evaluate, implement, and sustain AI tools in their actual jobs, not as a conceptual exercise, but as a practical build. The course follows a Build-Govern-Sustain arc. Informed by emerging work on non-linear learning sequences, the course inverts the traditional pedagogical approach - students begin by generating real outputs with AI before analyzing them critically, then progress through structured prompting, workflow construction, governance and validation, and long-term sustainability practices. Each week connects to a single professional challenge the student brings to the course at the outset, creating a continuous t across all five weeks rather than a sequence of isolated activities. The design process surfaced a core tension in AI education: tool-specific knowledge changes faster than curriculum cycles. The resulting course prioritizes durable skills - evaluation, workflow architecture, governance - over platform-specific training, offering a transferable model for professional AI education that prioritizes what students can do after the course over what they knew during it.
Recommended Citation
Hughes, Ashleigh, "AI for Professional Work: Designing a Professional Certificate Course in Applied AI" (2026). 2026 Symposium. 36.
https://dc.ewu.edu/srcw_2026/ps_2026/p2_2026/36
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
AI for Professional Work: Designing a Professional Certificate Course in Applied AI
PUB NCR
Eastern Washington University's Professional and Continuing Education department identified a need for AI-focused course material for working professionals. AI for Professional Work was developed in response - a five-week professional certificate course that teaches participants how to evaluate, implement, and sustain AI tools in their actual jobs, not as a conceptual exercise, but as a practical build. The course follows a Build-Govern-Sustain arc. Informed by emerging work on non-linear learning sequences, the course inverts the traditional pedagogical approach - students begin by generating real outputs with AI before analyzing them critically, then progress through structured prompting, workflow construction, governance and validation, and long-term sustainability practices. Each week connects to a single professional challenge the student brings to the course at the outset, creating a continuous t across all five weeks rather than a sequence of isolated activities. The design process surfaced a core tension in AI education: tool-specific knowledge changes faster than curriculum cycles. The resulting course prioritizes durable skills - evaluation, workflow architecture, governance - over platform-specific training, offering a transferable model for professional AI education that prioritizes what students can do after the course over what they knew during it.
