Culminating Project: AI in Your Field — Insight, Ethics, and Action
Putting your AI literacy into practice in the real world
Important Note
To earn this microcedential, students must complete the following assignment and email it to DLCenter@MontgomeryCollege.edu
If you have any questions, or need help/guidance completing this assignment, please contact the Digital Learning Center.
Purpose:
This project is your opportunity to showcase the depth of your AI literacy in a real-world, career-connected context. You will investigate how AI is being used in a field you are interested in or currently in (e.g., healthcare, education, law enforcement, journalism, business, trades), and use your learning from this course to explore the implications, challenges, and opportunities of AI in that space.
Prompt:
Step 1: Choose a Field of Interest
Step 2: Investigate AI Use
Research how artificial intelligence (AI) is currently being used in your selected field. Your investigation should include the following:
- Specific AI tools, platforms, or systems: Refer to examples in the course Pressbook to guide your selection.
- Types of applications: Describe how AI is being used, such as for automation, decision support, personalization, or other relevant functions.
- Impacts on the field: Consider how AI affects workers, workflows, equity, and outcomes within the profession.
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- Your explanation should reflect how AI impacts workers, systems, equity, and outcomes in this sector. Use at least one example of an actual AI tool or platform used in that field (e.g., Adobe Firefly in design, Epic Systems in healthcare, Grammarly in writing).
- Two comparison sectors: In one short paragraph each, describe how AI is being used in two sectors other than your chosen field (e.g., resume filtering, healthcare diagnostics, personalized advertising). This shows you can recognize AI across the real world, not only in one place.
- Name the kind of AI: For your main example, say whether the system is machine learning, predictive AI, or generative AI, and explain briefly how it learns from data.
To complete your research:
- Use reliable, published sources such as academic journals, news or magazine articles, and professional publications from the past 10 years.
- You may use generative AI tools (such as ChatGPT or Gemini) to assist in gathering or summarizing information. However, you are expected to apply the AI literacy skills developed in this course:
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- Double-check all facts for accuracy.
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- Verify the credibility of your sources.
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- Cross-reference information using multiple reputable publications.
If you are unsure whether a source is credible or need help locating sources, consult the Montgomery College Library or use the Library’s online Research Help service.
Step 3: Apply Your AI Literacy
Using the knowledge from this microcredential:
- Identify blind spots, risks, or ethical challenges relating to the use of AI in your chosen field (e.g., bias, privacy, environmental impact, transparency).
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- Data bias is required. Explain how bias in training data can shape AI outputs, and support your explanation with at least one documented real-world case. Amazon’s experimental resume screening system, which downgraded resumes from women (Dastin, 2018), and the healthcare risk algorithm that underestimated the needs of Black patients (Obermeyer et al., 2019) are two cases covered in the Pressbook.
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- Consider environmental impacts (e.g., energy use, e-waste, water consumption) of AI systems in your field. For the lifecycle view, use the UNEP issue note Artificial Intelligence (AI) End-to-End: The Environmental Impact of the Full AI Lifecycle Needs to Be Comprehensively Assessed (2024). For water specifically, use Li et al. (2025). Find and report their projection yourself rather than repeating the sentence from the Pressbook. Note what the figure actually measures, because water withdrawal and water consumption are not the same thing.
- Analyze who may be most affected (e.g., marginalized communities, workers, consumers).
- Apply an ethical framework by name. Use either UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (2021) or the Digital Promise AI literacy framework (Mills et al., 2024), and show the framework working on your case rather than only naming it. These are the two frameworks Domain 4 is scored against. Montgomery College’s RESPECT heuristic is a useful self-check while you draft, but it is not one of the two, so do not submit it in place of them.
- Show your own process with AI:
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- Include at least one example of a revised or refined prompt and explain why it improved the output.
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- Describe what tools you used (e.g., ChatGPT, NotebookLM) and why they were appropriate for different tasks.
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- Evaluate at least one AI output against more than one standard: accuracy, tone, and credibility. Say what you changed as a result.
- Use at least three technical terms from the course (e.g., LLM, embeddings, hallucinations, prompt engineering, transformer architecture). Do not simply list or define these terms. Each term must do real work in a sentence that explains something about your own process or about how AI behaves in your field. A term that could be deleted without changing your meaning does not count.
Step 4: Propose Solutions and Personal Action
Demonstrate how a responsible AI user can:
- Name one specific way to mitigate harm or raise awareness in your field, and one named publication, organization, or professional body you will use to stay current. “Keep learning” is not an answer; name the thing.
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- Walk through one realistic AI-supported task from your chosen field, start to finish. Pick something concrete such as drafting a professional email, planning a project, or preparing interview materials. Name the tool, show the prompt, and state the best practices you followed and the pitfalls you avoided. This walkthrough and the prompt you quote in Step 3 do not count against your word or slide limit.
Submission Options (Choose One):
- 3–5 Page Research Report (900–1500 words, APA or MLA format)
OR
- Presentation Slides (14 to 20 slides with speaker notes, visuals, and citations in APA or MLA format)
OR
- Video Essay (7 to 9 minutes, recorded voice or on-camera, includes cited visuals in APA or MLA format)
Minimum Requirements:
- Use at least 3 credible sources (peer-reviewed articles, professional organizations, government reports, magazines, and news articles). For each one, add a single sentence saying why it is credible: who produced it, how you know they are in a position to know, and whether anything about it gave you pause. Sources you find yourself are welcome and encouraged. The following sources from the course Pressbook have been verified and always count toward the minimum:
- Address all 5 domains of the rubric at the “Competent” level or higher
- Include a short reflection (150–250 words) on what you learned about yourself as a future professional and AI user. Reflect on how AI may shape your future career path, how you plan to stay current with AI tools, and how your values inform your use of AI in work settings.
- Cite all sources properly (APA/MLA, or video slide credits)
Assessment Criteria:
Your project will be evaluated using the AI Literacy for Career & College Success Microcredential Rubric. To earn the microcredential, you must:
- Complete all microcredential learning modules
- Score “Competent” (2) or higher in each of the 5 rubric domains:
- Understand What AI Is and Isn’t
- Recognize AI in the Real World
- Use AI Effectively
- Use AI Responsibly
- Prepare for the Future with AI
There is no separate points threshold to clear. Competent in all five domains is 10 out of 15, and that is the bar.
What “Competent” and “Accomplished” mean here. Competent is this assignment, done as written and done well. If you complete every requirement above with care, you earn the microcredential. Accomplished is for work that goes past the assignment: a complication you found and named, an AI output or a source you rejected and explained, a framework you pushed until it stopped resolving the problem cleanly. You do not need a 3 in any domain to earn the credential. The column is there for students who want to reach for it.
Note:
Media Attributions
- Sep 13, 2025, 06_59_38 PM