Dr Lighton Phiri was invited by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) to deliver a session at its Winter School Capacity Building Workshop for Higher Education Institutions, held at the Chrismar Hotel in Livingstone from July 15 to 17, 2026. The workshop's theme was Strengthening Higher Education Curriculum Quality Through Quality Assurance in the Era of Digital Transformation and Artificial Intelligence, and Dr Phiri's session, Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Curriculum Leaders: Essential Competencies for Quality Assurance in the Digital Era, was aimed at the curriculum and quality assurance leaders of Zambian universities and colleges.
The session
The session began with the building blocks of large language models and why the quality of a prompt determines the quality of the output, and introduced the CLEAR prompting framework. Two live demonstrations followed: using AI to modernise the syllabus of a university course (CSC 4792), and using AI to check a learning programme for compliance with the HEA Learning Programme Audit Tool.
Dr Phiri then discussed how AI can be integrated across the three pillars of a higher education institution (teaching, research and community engagement), presented a practical quality assurance toolkit built around tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity and NotebookLM, and closed with governance and data privacy, including the case for running LLMs locally when working with sensitive institutional data.
