Your courses were designed for a world without AI in it. Which ones still work?
Most universities can answer that for a handful of courses somebody happens to feel strongly about. Almost none can answer it for the catalog. The dean or the provost sponsors the work. Faculty lead it. Nobody’s curriculum authority moves.
Course level, not institution level
Scored from your syllabi, not just the catalog
Faculty keep curriculum authority
Yours to keep, nothing to renew
Curriculum decisions are being made one course at a time, by whoever cares most.
A faculty member redesigns an assignment because a student handed in something a model clearly wrote. A department adds an AI policy. A dean asks for a plan. Each of those is reasonable. Together they are not a strategy, and nobody can say which courses are most exposed or which should move first.
Ask what fraction of your catalog anyone has actually assessed for this. The number is usually close to none.
Meanwhile the assumption underneath a degree — that the capability it builds stays scarce long enough to be worth the tuition — is exactly the assumption AI is testing. That is a strategic question about the institution’s position, not an instructional-technology question, and it does not get answered by adding a chatbot to the library.
The dean or the provost sponsors. Faculty lead. Nobody’s curriculum authority moves.
Curriculum modernization run at faculty rather than with them reliably produces resistance, and it deserves to. Faculty senates hold authority over curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, and that is not a procedural obstacle to route around — it is the reason a change that does get adopted actually holds.
So the roles are separated on purpose. Someone sponsors — cover, resources, and the urgency that makes the work real — without mandating a single course change. Across an institution that is the provost; inside one college it is the dean, and the job is identical either way. Faculty decide what happens to any course. Sagebridge supplies the evidence and runs the process, and has no opinion that a committee cannot overrule.
Practically: the audit arrives as a faculty intelligence tool, not an administrative directive. Deans and chairs are briefed college by college. Departments opt in. What comes back is a scored view faculty can argue with, which is the point — an argument about evidence is a better argument than one about whether the administration should be doing this at all.
Inside one college the unit is smaller and nothing else changes: that college’s curriculum committee decides, and its faculty hold exactly the authority the senate holds university-wide.
Three steps, and you can stop after any of them.
Curriculum Exposure Audit
A sample of your catalog, scored on seven dimensions and rolled up to department and college: what AI commoditizes, what it makes more durable, and where redesign is urgent. Built from your public catalog, so it needs nothing from you and no one has to approve it first.
Curriculum Exposure Sprint
One named group of courses — a department, a general education core, a college’s gateway sequence — scored from their syllabi rather than the catalog. Faculty sessions on the findings, and a redesign sequence the department owns at the end of it. Usually bought by the dean whose college it covers.
AI Curriculum Intelligence Engagement
Every college rather than one, scored from syllabi and rescored each academic cycle as courses change — with a seat at the table through the decisions that follow. Faculty facilitation, dean and chair briefings, and the advisory work that turns a scored curriculum into a changed one.
One college is the right size to start, and usually the faster one.
The sprint is scoped to a college for a practical reason. It runs on syllabi, and a dean can have them in a week — a request to chairs you already talk to. The same request made across every college of a university is itself a project, which is why the institution-wide version needs twelve months before the good scoring even begins.
A college also has what a whole catalog does not: one budget holder, one curriculum committee, and chairs who know each other. Five weeks at a fixed fee fits inside that. No cabinet decision has to be arranged first.
One thing worth doing early. Tell the provost’s office the work is happening. Not permission — visibility. Shared governance runs on nobody being surprised, and a college-level engagement the provost’s office hears about second-hand starts on the wrong footing for reasons that have nothing to do with the work itself.
It also tends to be how a wider conversation starts. A college that has done this has something a proposal does not: findings from courses the rest of the institution recognizes.
The catalog is where this starts. It is not where it should end.
Course descriptions are frequently years out of date, written for accreditation and recruitment rather than to describe what is actually taught, and pitched at a generality that hides the very thing AI displaces. The syllabus has the assignments, the assessment scheme, the tools students are told to use, and the week the topic actually appears.
That difference is not cosmetic. Of the seven dimensions scored, one is decisive:
From the catalog, assessment vulnerability is inferred
We are reading a paragraph of description and estimating what the assignments probably look like. Useful, and honest about being an estimate.
From the syllabus, it is read off the page
The assessment scheme is right there, with its weightings. Whether a course can be completed by a model without the student learning anything stops being a guess.
Every score reports which of the two it came from, and every audit reports the mix. You will always be able to tell which findings rest on evidence and which on inference.
Ten years of this was spent inside a university, not consulting to one.
Daren co-founded the Nittany AI Challenge at Penn State in 2017 and built it into the Nittany AI Alliance, which he ran as Executive Director of Innovation until March 2026, with IBM, Google and AWS among its partners.
Which means the parts that are specific to your world are not new to him: shared governance, a faculty senate that can and should say no, deans with eleven different views, the gap between what a provost can announce and what a department will adopt, and the fact that a chief academic officer turns over faster than any other senior role on campus while a curriculum change takes longer than one of them lasts.
A sample of your catalog, scored.
It needs nothing from your institution and commits you to nothing. Say which college or department to start with, and what you are trying to decide.