How can a Shakespeare course teach students to think critically about AI while also building AI literacy skills? This session shares Bardbot: Reading Shakespeare in the Age of AI, an openly licensed literature course built on a CC BY-NC Pressbooks textbook and open education resources. Shakespeare is not an arbitrary choice: his works are among the most overrepresented texts in any LLM training corpus—public domain, fully digitized, and surrounded by centuries of secondary criticism. That saturation makes AI outputs about Shakespeare a perfect test case for AI literacy training, offering students a familiar target for interrogating the false confidence of a model trained on SparkNotes. Attendees will leave with practical strategies for embedding AI literacy in open humanities courses without abandoning academic rigor. We will also explore strategies to support AI literacy without requiring AI tool use.
Attendees of this session will be able to:- Apply at least two strategies for embedding AI literacy into existing open education courses without displacing core disciplinary learning goals.
- Distinguish between unreflective AI use and the "hybrid writing" model, and explain how transparent, bounded use can model ethical practice for students.
- Analyze why texts overrepresented in LLM training data (such as Shakespeare) create productive conditions for teaching critical evaluation of AI-generated analysis.
- Locate and adapt openly licensed course materials, including the Critical Worlds Pressbooks textbook, for use in a specific institutional context.
- Evaluate course design approaches that build AI literacy for students who choose not to use generative tools.
