Instructor-Fixed Term

MSU Careers Details • East Lansing, MI

4d

About The Position

Michigan State University actively promotes a dynamic research and learning environment in which qualified individuals of differing perspectives, and cultural backgrounds pursue academic goals with mutual respect and shared inquiry. The College of Social Science at Michigan State University invites applications for a fixed term instructor with expertise in artificial intelligence practice in business and nonprofit applications.

Requirements

• Master's Degree by date of hire
• Prior professional experience in delivering AI or software solutions for organizations.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on expertise across the full applied AI stack, including agents and multi-agent systems, retrieval-augmented generation, vector databases, and workflow-automation tooling, together with the ability to stand up and maintain the supporting technical infrastructure.
• Both a graduate credential in education or a closely related area, and business or organizational-management expertise (such as an MBA), reflecting the ability to pair a student-centered, project-based instructional approach with real business and organizational context.
• Demonstrated ability to translate complex technical systems for non-technical stakeholders through discovery, documentation, training, and professional presentation.
• Experience recruiting, onboarding, and managing external business partners for applied or experiential learning projects.
• Demonstrated record of maintaining currency with rapidly evolving AI tools, models, and methods.
• Familiarity with responsible-AI principles in practice, including data protection, guardrails, transparency, and human-centered design.

Responsibilities

• Teach a 3-credit project-based experiential learning course in applied AI and organizational intelligence, delivering current production practice
• Serve as an active-practitioner instructor by drawing on current, hands-on experience building and deploying AI systems in live organizational settings, and continually translating that firsthand work into course content, demonstrations, and case examples.
• Identify, secure, and manage external partner organizations each semester (for example, area businesses, nonprofits, or public-sector agencies) whose real-world challenges anchor student team projects and who receive working, student-built deliverables.
• Design, prepare, host, and maintain the technical learning environment on which students build, including the self-hosted model access, workflow-automation, and vector-database infrastructure that supports the course.
• Provide hands-on instruction across the full applied AI stack, including prompting, embeddings, large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, vector databases, multi-modal generation, function calling, agents, multi-agent systems, and workflow automation.
• Deliver instruction through live demonstrations, guided build sessions, real-time debugging, and iterative sprint-style deliverables rather than lecture and exams, applying recognized AI-competency and team-performance frameworks to structure applied learning.
• Continually update course materials, tools, and assessments to keep pace with rapidly evolving AI technologies, ensuring content remains current between offerings.
• Design and administer assignments and assessments, prepare and provide all class materials, communicate regularly with students, coordinate with the instructor of record and program staff on progress and logistics, and submit final grades (Pass/No Pass) by university deadlines.

What This Job Offers

• Career Level: Entry Level