AVC 248, an AI-powered capstone

Goal

Turn the professional-practices capstone into an online course where every student leaves with something they keep using: a real portfolio, a career plan tied to the jobs they actually want, and a working understanding of how to build with AI. Not a grade, a launch.

Audience

Online design students finishing an associate degree, most of them working adults, each headed toward a different goal. The course also doubles as a model other faculty can borrow for building an AI-literate course of their own.

Process, how it works

I designed it backward from measurable outcomes, wrote a competency map, and built the whole course directly in Canvas, packaged so it can be imported cleanly. An AI-literacy unit opens the term so students understand the tools before they use them. From there they work through nine modules, each a step toward the finished portfolio, using Render, the career tool built into the course, across the entire semester rather than as a one-off assignment.

The assessment, built to be authentic

Instead of a single exam, students demonstrate competency through real artifacts and defend their thinking out loud in project walkthroughs, so the evidence is theirs and hard to fake. The capstone has each student build a portable career agent, a plain-text file that keeps working in any AI tool after the class ends, so the learning outlasts the semester.

Accessibility and reuse

Built to WCAG 2.1 AA and Universal Design for Learning from the first draft, with the construct held fixed while the way students show it can flex. The course is modular and packaged for import, so pieces can be reused and adapted rather than rebuilt.

Honest status

The full AI and assessment structure runs for the first time in Fall 2026, and Render is a prototype heading into its first pilot that term. This is a designed and built course being tested, not a finished claim, and the Fall run is where I measure what actually works.