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The goal of this workshop is to enable teaching faculty to perform a self-assessment of GenAI readiness in order to articulate a personal action plan.

Objectives

• Articulate a personal reflexion about the use of GenAI in one’s praxis
• Determine a strategy to upskill around GenAI
• Identify 3 simple action items

GenAI today

Rutgers University offers an Artificial Intelligence in Accounting and Assurance Concentration. 

AACSB runs a yearly survey of Deans and Faculty use of Gen AI: the general consensus surmises that the best approach to integration implies the upskilling of faculty so that they may become key stakeholders in leading the change. EDUCAUSE Review 2026 leans heavily in this same direction.

In terms of complexity: Machine learning < Deep learning < … < generative artificial intelligence. A “grading bot” is likely to be some kind of classifier algorithme, closer to deep learning than a full LLM enables GenAI tool.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI on what ChatGPT, during the Town Hall held on January 26th 2026, on what ChatGPT fails to do well: creativity; intuition; judgment (at 27th minute of video). Mindset for humans using GenAI: abundance; resilience; collaboration (ibid).

Tour de table

Please answer the following questions:

• What is your name?
• How would you self describe your own knowledge and comfort using Gen AI?
• What scares you the most about Gen AI?
• What excites the most?
• What is your next step?

Action items brainstorm

Many resources are offered at Concordia and beyond. The Center of Teaching and Learning offers Guidelines on teaching as well as assessment design. The Library provides a online learning module called GenAI Quickstart: Foundations for Faculty. Many “classes” are available on prompt engineering or GenAI via the university’s Udemy subscription.

Let’s ask Copilot for some ideas:

Prompt you are a senior librarian working in a large… | Try in Copilot Chat

you are a senior librarian working in a large metropolitan canadian university. You need to lead a workshop on generative ai for the benefit of teaching faculty in the accountancy department. could you identify a list of 10 simple action items that faculty may explore tomorrow to upskill on gen ai use in their praxis and make for a future ready teaching strategy

 

Response

Absolutely—here’s a practical, low-barrier set of 10 action items accountancy faculty can try immediately to build confidence with generative AI and begin integrating it into teaching in a responsible, future-ready way.

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10 “Start Tomorrow” Actions for Accountancy Faculty

1. Draft Better Lecture Outlines in Minutes

Paste a syllabus topic (e.g., revenue recognition, auditing standards) into a GenAI tool and ask:

“Create a 60-minute lecture outline for undergraduate accounting students, including examples and discussion questions.”

✅ Benefit: Saves prep time and introduces new ways to structure content.

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2. Generate Realistic Practice Problems

Ask AI to:

“Create 5 intermediate-level problems on lease accounting with solutions.”

✅ Benefit: Quickly expands problem banks and supports differentiated learning.

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3. Create Case-Based Learning Scenarios

Prompt:

“Generate a short case where a company faces ethical issues in financial reporting.”

✅ Benefit: Supports critical thinking and aligns with CPA competencies.

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4. Simplify Complex Concepts for Students

Paste a dense accounting standard and ask:

“Explain this in plain language for first-year students.”

✅ Benefit: Improves accessibility and inclusive teaching.

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5. Design In-Class Activities

Prompt:

“Create a 20-minute group activity on internal controls for a class of 40 students.”

✅ Benefit: Encourages active learning without extensive prep.

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6. Build Rubrics Quickly

Ask:

“Create a grading rubric for a financial analysis assignment, including criteria and levels.”

✅ Benefit: Standardizes grading and saves time.

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7. Generate Multiple Versions of Assignments

Prompt:

“Create 3 slightly different versions of this accounting problem for academic integrity.”

✅ Benefit: Helps reduce cheating while maintaining fairness.

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8. Use AI as a “Student Simulator”

Ask:

“Act as a student and ask questions about cash flow statements.”

✅ Benefit: Reveals likely student misunderstandings in advance.

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9. Provide Feedback on Student Writing (Drafts)

Paste anonymized student work and ask:

“Suggest constructive feedback on clarity and argumentation.”

✅ Benefit: Speeds up feedback cycles while maintaining quality.

⚠️ Reminder: Avoid uploading identifiable student data—follow institutional privacy policies.

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10. Start a Classroom Transparency Practice

Introduce AI explicitly to students:

• Show how you use it to generate examples
• Discuss ethical use in accounting education
• Co-create guidelines for acceptable use

✅ Benefit: Builds digital literacy and academic integrity awareness.

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Bonus: A Simple First Prompt to Try

If faculty only try one thing:

“I am teaching intermediate financial accounting. Generate a short, engaging classroom example explaining deferred tax liabilities, including numbers and a step-by-step explanation.”

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Framing for Faculty

• Start small—augmentation, not replacement
• Focus on efficiency + pedagogy
• Emphasize critical evaluation of AI outputs
• Align with professional standards (e.g., CPA competencies, ethics)

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If you’d like, I can also turn this into a 1-hour workshop plan, slides, or a hands-on exercise sheet tailored to your department.

In this post, I provide some introductory remarks on copyright and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) for colleagues in the accountancy department at the John Molson School of Business (JMSB) at Concordia University.

1. How does copyright work?

Copyright is enacted by a federal statute, whereby conferring economic and artistic rights to creators of qualifying works. These rights may be mobilized by contracts or agreements, often called licenses when they are limited in scope. Copyright agreements mobilize copyrights with regards to many components, such as monetary flows, duration and termination, geographical dimension, markets, exclusivity, transferability… the complexity and nature of copyright agreements is up to the parties involved, the federal statute allows for an almost infinite combination of arrangements. When mobilizing exclusive rights, an agreement is necessary.

Copyright ownership is usually vested in the original creator. In Canada, employers are assigned the ownership of copyrighted works produced by their full time & permanent employees, unless their work contract stipulates otherwise. At Concordia, the CUFA collective agreement reverts copyright back to faculty with the University retaining a license on all materials for educational purposes for a decate. On the other hand, the CUPFA collective agreement, governing contractual workers, is silent in the matter.

In recent years, the digital environment has introduced a new kind of agreement, open licenses, which facilitate the sharing, reuse or distribution of online content without remuneration. These include Creative Commons or open source software licenses. At Concordia University Libraries, we support the transition to open access through open textbooks, open scholarship, and Spectrum, our open archive. Open licenses are essential to the movement toward open access.

In addition to economic and artistic rights, the Copyright Act edicts exceptions that are afforded to user communities in specific and limited circumstances. The most notable are the “fair dealings” exceptions, not to be confused with “fair use” in the USA. In Canada, there are eight fair dealings: education, research, private study, news reporting, parody, satire, criticism or review. In the “CCH Case”  of 2004, the Supreme Court of Canada established boundaries to fair dealings. Other exceptions include those for the print disabled, for libraries and archives, or for educational institutions. When one qualifies for an exception, use may proceed with neither an agreement nor a payment. Libraries are often tasked with governing copyright exceptions.

Also, Copyright establishes institutions that govern the artistic, cultural, creative or communication ecosystems. These include collecting societies which automate or streamline rights clearance, a specialized tribunal, review parameters as well as other measures. In the educational sector, Copibec is a collecting society which offers licenses for reprography or digital use of textual material, most notably coursepacks. Similarly, the Library offers digital collections under licenses to the university community.

Finally, copyright interacts with many other legal regimes, most notably provisions in the Civil Code of Québec, which govern contracts or image rights, or federal telecommunications regulations, which govern what is broadcast on national airwaves.

For more information about Copyright, please access Concordia University Library’s Copyright Guide, the Policy on Copyright Compliance (SG-2), the Copyright Guidelines for instructors or simply ask your librarian before contacting anyone outside the organization about copyright.

1.1 Simplified copyright workflow

1.2 Digital works are often “compilations” of many other pieces

2. Generative Artificial Intelligence

2.1 GenAI at the Library

Concordia University Library offers many opportunities to engage with GenAI. These include:

GenAI Quickstart: Foundations for Faculty

Quick Things for Digital Knowledge

UdeMy subscription

2.2 GenAI at Concordia

Guidelines for Teaching with Generative Artificial Intelligence

3. Conclusion

Your librarian offers a bespoke and dedicated consulting service and is available to meet you, your students or your class upon request.

Every fall brings a new cohort of exceptional students to Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business. I have been asked to present, very succinctly, the library services and collections afforded to them upon joining us. They are in for quite a treat!

In fact, the library may seem a bit overwhelming to new students, given the breadth and depth of support to provide. So, I have prepared a short list of essential support provided by the library and librarians, specifically tailored for new graduate students. When in doubt, start with these elements.

1. The library website is your portal to our services and collections
   1. https://library.concordia.ca/
   2. Sofia, our NextGen search engine, covering the print and digital collection (with partial coverage of our market & industry resources). Search for academic articles and books here.
   3. Blue “ribon” – below Sofia – provides for quick access to popular resources: Databases by subject; eJournals; Citation guides
   4. Information for graduate students (we will cover these points in further detail below)
   5. A note about Google Scholar: use the settings to display “deep links” to articles in our databases, see: https://library.concordia.ca/help/using/google-scholar.php
2. Zotero
   1. https://library.concordia.ca/help/citing/index.php
   2. In Sofia and most article databases, you can upload bibliographic data directly to your own account on Zotero.
   3. Organize your readings in folders for your seminars as well as chapters to your thesis. Create your own abstracts and reading notes in special fields.
   4. You can create bibliographies automatically in hundreds of citations styles with the click of a button in your favorite. Check out our GradProSkills workshops on Zotero (or search YouTube!)
3. Spectrum
   1. https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/
   2. Theses defended at Concordia University. Yours will be made available here at the end of your studies.
   3. Advance search: by department or by advisor (find out about past projects)
   4. For theses from around the world, use the database named ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Full Text, PQDT: https://concordiauniversity.libguides.com/az.php?q=pqdt
   5. Pro tip: find a few theses of interest and get a sense of the scope, tone, and use their bibliography as a starting point for your literature review!
4. RSS for “Really Simple Syndication”
   1. https://library.concordia.ca/help/using/rss/index.php
   2. Be at the forefront of your discipline by harvesting RSS feeds on a special app or website. Subscribe to the table of contents of journals (find the RSS feed address on the Journal publisher’s website), setup an alert in article databases like ProQuest or enjoy webcomics for academics (like https://xkcd.com/)
5. TOC: Learn how to create a Table of Contents automatically in any word processing software… you need to encode your document properly
   1. How to do this in MS Word: https://www.outfind.ca/using-word-with-style-ms-word-tm-2007-edition/
6. Scholarly workflows
   1. Copyright, open access & licensing: https://library.concordia.ca/copyright/students.html
   2. Research data management: https://library.concordia.ca/research/data/
   3. Bibliometrics and research impact: https://library.concordia.ca/research/bibliometrics/
   4. GenAI Quickstart guide: https://library.concordia.ca/learn/genai/index.html
7. Remember to ask us questions!
   1. For general information: https://library.concordia.ca/help/questions/
   2. Request an appointment with your subject librarian: https://library.concordia.ca/about/staff/business.php
8. Take care and enjoy our collection – we allocate about 7 million dollars a year to enrich it!