First-year students arrive at liberal arts institutions at the precise moment they are forming their intellectual and ethical identities as scholars, and they arrive already using AI. At Middlebury College, we designed a coordinated, multi-modal approach to help students critically engage with AI within that formative context. Our model centers on GenAI @ Middlebury, a short asynchronous Canvas course, paired with custom in-class workshops co-developed with First-Year Seminar (FYS) faculty, and peer support for students. Together, these resources equip students to analyze AI's role in their learning - to shortcut or support - while giving faculty the knowledge and confidence to facilitate meaningful classroom conversations. In its first year (AY 2025–2026), 250 people engaged with the Canvas course and we partnered with 11 FYS faculty to build tailored workshops for their courses. This lightning talk outlines our development process, faculty partnership strategy, and preliminary student outcome data.
Academic Integrity in the Age of AI (Bertram Gallant, Davis, & Khan, 2026) includes a speculative fiction story imagining a university in 2045, a future in which institutions layer AI onto outdated teaching and assessment models instead of rethinking academic integrity for this new era. This pop-up book club uses that story to spark conversation across two 30-minute sessions. No advance reading required - we'll hand out short quotes to react to on the spot. In the first session, we'll dig into where our own institutions already feel like they're drifting toward that imagined future. In the second session, we turn toward alternatives: what could a better path actually look like? Each session stands on its own, so come to one or both.
