AI literacy for academic authors

Academia Raetica

About the course

Generative AI is rapidly transforming the academic landscape, offering powerful opportunities to streamline research workflows while simultaneously raising complex questions regarding integrity and authorship. This workshop is designed to equip researchers at all career stages within Academia Raetica with the skills to use AI tools ethically and effectively, in full alignment with good scientific practice and current publisher guidelines.

Through a blend of theoretical insights, interactive live demonstrations, and hands-on exercises, participants will learn to distinguish between ethical support (such as structural brainstorming, literature summarization, and language polishing) and unethical practices. The course moves beyond basic usage to cover advanced prompting strategies and specific workflows, allowing authors to offload non-core tasks and focus on high-level scientific reasoning. Crucially, the curriculum emphasizes a critical approach, training participants to identify AI failures such as bias, hallucinations, and fake citations, while navigating essential legal and data privacy issues.

To ensure maximum relevance, the course content will be fine-tuned based on a pre-workshop survey, and includes a gap-week for optional home assignments with personalised feedback.

Objectives

After completing the workshop, the participants will be able to:

• Navigate Ethics: Distinguish between legitimate AI assistance and scientific misconduct in alignment with Good Scientific Practice and publisher guidelines.

• Optimize Workflows: Integrate AI tools to streamline drafting and editing, freeing up time for high-level scientific reasoning.

• Manage Risks: Identify AI limitations (bias, hallucinations) and navigate the legal and privacy implications of AI-assisted writing.

Content

• AI Fundamentals: Understanding how generative writing tools function.

• Tool Landscape: Overview of generic versus academia-specific solutions.

• Practical Application: Mastering prompting strategies and efficient workflows.

• Critical Evaluation: Addressing ethics, bias, privacy, and quality assurance.

Methodology

• Theory-block to understand the workings of AI tools, their strengths and weaknesses

• Interactive presentation with live demonstrations of various AI-powered tools

• Hands-on exercises with in-class tasks and optional home-assignment with feedback

• Group work and discussion of ethical and methodological challenges

Course Materials: Will be made available digitally after the workshop under the CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Trainer

Dr. Ana Petrus is the founder of scivia LLC (https://scivia.ch), a consultancy specialising in research data management and digital sustainability, and adjunct lecturer in Data Management at the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons (FHGR). She has built her career at the intersection of higher education, international projects, and cutting-edge challenges in the digital era. With 20 years of expertise in academia and multinational collaborations with both governmental and non-governmental organisations, her work focuses on research data management in STEM and interdisciplinary fields, as well as FAIR principles, open science, and digital sustainability. Dr. Petrus holds a PhD and teaching certificate from ETH Zurich, along with project management certifications from IPMA and the University of Oxford. She serves on the scientific advisory board of the data management portal olos.swiss and is a member of the AI Taskforce and Research Data Management working group of LIBER, the Association of European Research Libraries.

General information and fee

• Dates: Friday, March 13, 2026 and Friday, March 20, from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM

• Place: online via Zoom

• Lecturer: Dr. Ana Petrus / scivia

• Language: English

• Target Audience: Researchers at all career stages from member and partner institutions of Academia Raetica. A survey will be sent out to the participants before the course in order to fine-tune the contents to their current knowledge and needs.

• Course fee for participants from Academia Raetica member or partner institutions: CHF 50

• Fee for external participants (not working at an Academia Raetica member or partner institution): CHF 80

• Registration deadline: February 23, 2026

• Max. number participants: 12 (min. number participants 8)

• Our terms and conditions

• Course Coordinator: Daniela Heinen, daniela.heinen@academiaraetica.ch, phone 081 410 60 84

• A "Certificate of Attendance" will be issued upon request, if you complete the sessions on March 13 and 20, 2026.

Registration

For any questions regarding the transferable skills courses of Academia Raetica or if you encounter issues with the registration process, please feel free to contact Daniela Heinen. Please review our terms and conditions.

You will promptly receive an automated email response containing your registration details. The final confirmation of your course placement will be sent to you a few days later.

Email: daniela.heinen@academiaraetica.ch
Phone: +41 81 410 60 84

Academia Raetica
Obere Strasse 22
7270 Davos Platz

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