This week’s focus is on finishing out your planning for fall’s course proposal or course update: the exercises will include some suggestions of how you might use tools like the Claude Code CLI or Cowork to assist with that work without replacing your own pedagogical intention or labor.

The closing week. There is no in-person session.

Asynchronous closing. Complete at least one exercise from the menu below — the Standard exercise (course-proposal or syllabus revision) is the strongest recommendation if you have only a few hours, since that’s the use of this week with the longest tail.

The Frame for This Week

The series ends not with a flourish but with a course proposal — yours. Most of you came in with a syllabus that needed updating, a course you wanted to propose, or a unit you wanted to redesign. This week is for finishing that work, with whatever AI assistance is useful to you and not replacing the pedagogical labor you actually want to do.

A useful sorting question, before you open Claude this week:

• Where do I want help? (Drafting boilerplate. Generating examples. Sanity-checking learning outcomes against actual readings. Building a small rubric. Drafting a single assignment description in three discipline-appropriate registers.)
• Where do I not want help? (The course’s argument. The choice of texts. The thing that makes this course mine rather than someone else’s.)
• Where would help quietly replace the work? (Anything where the AI’s draft is competent enough that you stop noticing what you would have written.)

That third category is the one to watch.

Reading Menu

• Light Mollick, Ethan. “On Holding Back the Strange AI Tide.” One Useful Thing. (~25 min) A grounded final note on what is and is not under our control.
• Light Cohen, Dan. “The Reboot of Digital Humanities Now.” Humane Ingenuity. (~15 min) On the renewed relevance of DH infrastructure for AI-era work.
• Deep Johnson, Emily K., and Anastasia Salter. Critical Making in the Age of AI. Open access. Read the chapter most relevant to your discipline as a closing frame.

Exercise Menu

• Light Final reflection (500 words, ~30 min). What did you build across the series, what surprised you, and what will you carry into your fall classroom? Save it somewhere you will reread in October. Source pattern: HumanitiesAI/finalreflection.
• Standard Course proposal / syllabus revision with Claude Projects (~2–3 hr). This is the headline exercise of the week. Open a fresh Claude Project. Upload: your existing syllabus (if revising) or a CFP and your draft proposal (if proposing); the AI policy you drafted in W9; one of the artifacts you built across the series; and your CLAUDE.md from W11. Then iterate on the proposal or syllabus inside the Project, with Claude as a critical reader. Specifically:
  1. Ask Claude to identify three places your stated learning outcomes don’t match the actual assignments. Decide which ones are real misalignments and which are Claude misreading.
  2. Ask Claude to suggest one assignment that would teach the same outcome with the AI policy you drafted.
  3. Ask Claude to draft a 250-word public-facing summary of the course for your department’s website. Edit it heavily before you save it.

  Save the conversation and the final document. The conversation is part of the deliverable — it documents the iteration.

• Deep One CLI or Cowork session on a personal machine (~3+ hr, optional). If you have a personal machine you can use and want to try it, install Claude Code CLI and run one full Brainstorm → Spec → Plan → Implementation cycle on a small DH project of your choice — could be the course-site for fall. Document what differs from your Code Web experience. This is the only deep-dive exercise that asks you to install something — skip it without guilt if it does not fit your setup or institutional context.

A Few Sentences About Sharing

The NEH learning community continues beyond this twelve-week series. Workshop recordings, materials, and contributed artifacts will remain open at this site. Future cohorts will run during subsequent academic terms. If you would like to contribute a session, an exercise, a reading, or a syllabus revision back to the community, three options:

• Post to Humanities Commons and link from your CV.
• Open a public GitHub repo with a clear README and tag it for discoverability.
• Reach out to Dr. Salter directly and we’ll add it to the project’s reading-and-exercise menus for the next cohort.

The point of an open project is that other teachers can pick it up and use it. That’s how the learning community in the project’s title becomes real.

A Note for Returning Participants

If you’re coming back to these materials weeks or months from now: the readings are evergreen, the exercises are still doable, and the tools are likely renamed but recognizable. The pedagogical framework — sobriety, iteration, attribution, agency, refusal — is the part that won’t go stale. Anchor your fall planning there.

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the NEH. Thanks to the participants of this cohort, the Center for Humanities and Digital Research at UCF, and the broader DH community whose readings and exercises are stitched throughout this series.

Cross-references

• Source materials: HumanitiesAI/finalreflection; HumanitiesAI/weektwelve (planning mode for full project); DHSI 2026 — dhsi-2026-course-packet (skill-building, final tool deployment); CriticalMaking2026/exercises/reflection.