Developing Innovative Nursing Leadership Through An AI-Assisted Project

My colleague and I are instructors at a large nursing program in the Midwest, and we wanted to explore new assignments for graduate-level nursing students taking a leadership course. With rapid changes occurring in healthcare, especially with the introduction of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, we felt that it is important for nurse leaders to take the lead in exploring new ideas for improving patient care. The development of AI has had its fair share of pushback in academia, where there is great concern regarding the ethical use of AI in the classroom. In spite of these concerns, it’s important for educators to understand this relatively new technology and embrace its potential. As an introduction to the ways in which AI can be used to facilitate student learning and engagement, we jumped right in and created an assignment in which students would research an area of interest pertinent to nursing leadership and use Google’s NotebookLM as a tool to quickly summarize and organize key points found during the research process. After implementing the assignment, we found high levels of student engagement with NotebookLM as a learning tool. Future implementations of these assignments will attempt to not only improve on the current assignment but also more accurately measure student engagement and learning. Additionally, we plan to investigate the potential of many other AI-driven tools in not only our graduate-level programs but also with our undergraduate programs.