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Is there a way to have a gift card or coupon added to an order based upon the item that a customer is purchasing? If so can it be based on the value of the item they are purchasing? For example, if someone was purchasing a workshop for $100 I would like to give them a $50 credit towards another workshop in the future.

You could enable the "Send Stored Codes" setting for the main product and use that to issue a single-use discount code to each buyer. Essentially, this would be following our Gift Coupons technique, except that the Gift Coupon product would also include another actual product such as your workshop:
http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/tips.gift-coupons.htm

I have been reading some other things about gift code and bundling. Could I bundle a $50 workshop with a $25 gift coupon? On their next visit they would use that for the next purchase?

Bundling won't work to distribute codes, but you can handle this all in a single product listing anyway. You will just need to create a series of one-use $25 discount codes and copy that list of codes into the product for your workshop using the stored code features mentioned above.