The Prompting Cookbook: Shifting from Prompting to Context Engineering

Part of a six-session series from University Online Education Services (UOES), in partnership with TIIP. Each session consists of 60 minutes of content followed by a 30-minute work session.

Your students are taking your class, not a generic, average internet class. Context engineering is the practice of putting your own values, course materials, and academic standards at the center of what an AI responds with — instead of letting the open web fill in the answer. One-line prompting tricks are giving way to this more deliberate approach: anchoring AI output in the specific sources you choose. Using NotebookLM and comparable tools, you’ll practice grounding AI directly in your own syllabus and readings, and see why a well-fed model behaves very differently from an unanchored chatbot. The session closes by flipping the lens — context engineering is a student skill, too — and you’ll design an assignment component that asks students to curate and document the sources they feed to AI. The 30-minute work session is for grounding a tool in your own course materials.

This session fulfills Competencies 1, 3, and 4 of the Teaching and Generative AI Pathways Program and is open to Rutgers University staff and instructors of all ranks, appointment types, and disciplines.

What to bring: A current syllabus or a set of course readings.

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Questions about the Teaching with GenAI Faculty Workshop Series? Email Rick Anderson, Director of Emerging Technology at UOES: rick.anderson@uoes.rutgers.edu