Her Story
About Whitnie
I have been a nurse since 2009, starting my career in the emergency department where I fell in love with the older adult population. This passion eventually led me to long-term care and nursing leadership. Throughout my nursing career, I've always loved tutoring and educating, which drew me back to school in 2017 to pursue additional degrees. Two and a half years ago, I transitioned out of nursing leadership and hospital leadership to work in higher education. Now I teach in an active learning classroom, focusing on evidence-based practice, which is typically not a sexy topic, but I try to make it more engaging and interactive for my students. My days involve preparing lectures, working with co-faculty, grading, holding office hours, and taking students to clinicals one day a week. I'm particularly excited about my emerging work in AI, specifically building bots as virtual teaching assistants for my courses and creating assignments that allow students to interact meaningfully with AI. With my passion being gerontology, I'm really trying to see how AI influences everything we do in nursing education and clinical practice, and how it will impact patient outcomes. As an educator, it's my responsibility to make sure my students are prepared to responsibly and with integrity use these AI tools when they get out into clinical practice.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Whitnie
01What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think AI is here, whether we like it or not, and if you want to think about the possibilities, you're going to focus on the positive while being aware of the risks. We are being forced to take these risks, so we need to make sure that we do it in such a way that we are learning alongside our students. I think there are so many exciting things, and if we use it for good, we're going to beget positive outcomes. If we completely reject it and say, I don't like it, I want to do my own work, well, that's not the way the world is trending. I think it's irresponsible as educators, as leaders, if we don't accept it and try to tackle it with our students. Over the last couple of years, I've really enjoyed watching how AI is influencing not just education, but also nursing education and our clinical practice. With my passion being gerontology, I'm really trying to see how AI influences everything we do, how we educate our students, how they interact with our clients or patients out in practice, and how it's going to impact our patient outcomes. As an educator, it really is my responsibility to make sure that my students are prepared as much as possible when they get out into clinical practice, how to responsibly and with integrity use these AI tools that are afforded to them. We've been using AI for years, it's just newly widely available. The possibilities can be endless, but we cannot lose the human touch. AI will never be able to replace that.
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