AI Workshops for DSPH
AI Workshops for DSPH
Dornsife School of Public Health | Drexel University
A hands-on workshop series for staff and faculty
Welcome
This is a growing series of short, hands-on workshops introducing AI tools for staff and faculty at the Dornsife School of Public Health. Each workshop runs one hour: a brief overview followed by hands-on activities you can complete in the session. Three workshops run this summer, with more scheduled for fall—an Adobe documents-and-visuals session, an intro to agentic AI, and a session on AI for curriculum development.
The series is designed for everyone at DSPH—administrative staff, research staff, and faculty. No prior experience with AI is required. The focus is practical: what these tools can do, how to use them to save time on real work, and how to bring them into team projects.
Prefer to learn at your own pace? The new Self-Paced Tracks turn these topics into self-guided pages with practice activities, readiness quizzes, and curated readings—starting with a full Data & Analysis track.
The throughline across every workshop and track is the same: AI is a productivity tool, not a substitute for your expertise. Use it to get past the blank page, draft, summarize, and pressure-test your thinking—then bring your own judgment, taste, and accountability to the result. The goal is to develop the judgment for where AI needs close scrutiny (high-stakes, irreversible, or hard-to-verify work) and where it doesn’t—and to watch for cognitive offloading, handing over so much thinking that your own skills and voice quietly erode. More in Keeping Your Judgment: Cognitive Offloading & When to Scrutinize AI.
- Format: Three one-hour hands-on workshops (one hour each), bring a laptop
- Audience: DSPH staff (administrative and research) and faculty
- Dates: June 29, July 7, and July 14, 2026 — all 1:00–2:00 PM
- Location: TBD
- Recording: Sessions will be recorded and shared after the workshops
- Repeats: Additional sessions in summer or fall; series repeats in fall
- Facilitator: D. Alex Quistberg, PhD, MPH (daq26@drexel.edu)
The Workshops
| # | Workshop | What You’ll Do |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Foundations & Capabilities | What generative AI is, which Drexel-approved tools to use, and prompting that gets useful results |
| 2 | Workflow Enhancement | Use ChatGPT Edu, Copilot Chat, and Microsoft 365 Copilot to speed up writing, email, summarizing, and Office tasks |
| 3 | Collaboration on Projects | Use AI for meetings, project planning, shared prompts, and team documents |
| 4 | Documents & Visuals (Adobe) (Fall) | Acrobat AI Assistant for PDFs and Firefly for infographics and communication graphics |
| 5 | Getting Started with Agentic AI (Fall) | What “agentic” means, plus setting up assistants with instructions, knowledge, and reusable skills |
| 6 | AI for Curriculum Development (Fall) | Design courses and build teaching materials with ChatGPT Edu, Microsoft 365 Copilot (Teach), and NotebookLM |
The summer workshops build on each other but each can stand alone—come to all three, or drop into the ones most relevant to your work. Workshops 4, 5, and 6 are scheduled for fall.
Every workshop opens with a short, themed ethics and governance segment—how AI fails and who’s accountable (W1), verification and disclosure (W2), data and consent in team use (W3), representation and bias in AI media (W4), oversight of agents (W5), and academic integrity, accuracy, accessibility, and student-data privacy in teaching (W6). Together they build a practical foundation for responsible AI use at DSPH, grounded in Drexel policy and the ASPPH and WHO frameworks.
Quick Links
Who This Is For
This first series is one general track for the whole school. The activities are chosen to be useful whether you manage grants and schedules, coordinate research, or teach and run a lab.
Research staff who do statistical coding and analysis: we will run specialized sessions for you in summer or fall (using AI for data cleaning, coding in Stata/R/Python, debugging, and reproducible analysis). The three workshops here are the shared foundation everyone starts from.
Schedule
| Workshop | Topic | Date | Time | Location | Slides |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Foundations & Capabilities | Monday, June 29, 2026 | 1:00–2:00 PM | TBD | Open ↗ · PPTX |
| 2 | Workflow Enhancement | Tuesday, July 7, 2026 | 1:00–2:00 PM | TBD | Open ↗ · PPTX |
| 3 | Collaboration on Projects | Tuesday, July 14, 2026 | 1:00–2:00 PM | TBD | Open ↗ · PPTX |
| 4 | Documents & Visuals (Adobe) | Fall 2026 — TBD | 1:00–2:00 PM | TBD | — |
| 5 | Getting Started with Agentic AI | Fall 2026 — TBD | 1:00–2:00 PM | TBD | — |
| 6 | AI for Curriculum Development | Fall 2026 — TBD | 1:00–2:00 PM | TBD | — |
Before You Come
- Confirm your access to ChatGPT Edu (now available to faculty and staff — request access; see Tools & Access)
- Confirm you can sign in to Microsoft Copilot Chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot with your Drexel account
- Bring a laptop
- Bring a real (non-sensitive) work task you’d like help with—an email to draft, a document to summarize, a report section to outline
- Read the one-page data privacy rules below
Drexel-approved tools are not all equal on data:
- ChatGPT Edu is licensed by Drexel and governed by Drexel’s ChatGPT Edu Terms of Use. Your prompts are not used to train OpenAI models. Use GPT-5.5 when it appears in your model picker; otherwise use the current default/latest GPT model available in the Drexel workspace. Do not enter sensitive information that Drexel must protect by law, contract, or policy, including PHI.
- Microsoft Copilot Chat with Enterprise Data Protection is listed by Drexel as usable with High Risk Data when signed in with a Drexel account, and Low Risk Data otherwise.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams is listed by Drexel as usable with High Risk Data for licensed faculty and staff.
- Zoom AI Companion is listed by Drexel as usable with High Risk Data when a meeting is not recorded or transcribed, and Low Risk Data when it is recorded or transcribed. Notify participants when it is active.
- Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant, PDF Spaces, Creative Cloud, and Express are listed by Drexel as usable with Moderate Risk Data.
- Claude, ChatGPT personal, Gemini, Perplexity, and other consumer tools are Low Risk Data only unless separately approved by Drexel. Use these only with public or fully synthetic information.
When in doubt, de-identify, use synthetic data, or ask before entering anything sensitive. Drexel’s AI Tools page lists the approved data classification level for each tool. We cover this in detail in Workshop 1.
Questions?
Contact D. Alex Quistberg at daq26@drexel.edu.
About this site
This site and its materials were developed by D. Alex Quistberg with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic) — used as a drafting and design partner for the workshop content, self-paced tracks, and activities. In keeping with the series’ own guidance, AI helped accelerate the work, and the author reviewed, verified, and is accountable for what’s published here. Built with Quarto.