Much of the discussion surrounding AI in higher ed has focused on students using consumer-facing tools like ChatGPT. The University of Central Florida, one of the largest universities in the country and home to one of the largest online learning operations, is experimenting with AI behind the scenes to update and improve its own courses.
Working with digital learning company iDesign, UCF is using AI to evaluate and update 17 courses in its online RN-to-BSN program, scanning for alignment, accessibility and design consistency as the program moves to a new eight-week format for practicing nurses.
To learn more about the current and future role of AI in online course design and redesign, I reached out to my friends Tom Cavanagh, vice provost for digital learning at UCF, and Whitney Kilgore, iDesign founder and chief academic officer, to learn more.
Q: Tell us how this project and collaboration came about and the role AI plays in the workplace.
A: This project grew out of a real need for the program: The RN-to-BSN program is moving into a compressed eight-week format to better assist practicing nurses, individuals balancing demanding clinical schedules with their education. Rescheduling 17 courses at once, considering the number of students, requires both speed and accuracy. This is exactly where iDesign’s AI-powered Build platform becomes a real asset.
Build excels at work that benefits most from consistency and robustness at scale: ensuring tight alignment between standards and testing and producing draft content that gives faculty and designers a solid starting point. In a nursing system, where accreditation standards and eligibility frameworks are non-negotiable, having AI local alignment gaps and producing aligned drafts early in the process means we are not starting from a blank page and not leaving alignment to chance or memory.
But the platform is built around a clear philosophy: AI does what AI does best and humans do what humans do best. Our learning designers and learning partners don’t passively review AI results. They gather, question and organize, bringing the kind of judgment that only comes from understanding who these students really are. Nurse practitioners in an RN-to-BSN program do not need content written for a traditional undergraduate student. They bring clinical experience, professional ownership and real-time challenges to their learning. Ensuring that assessment and content demonstrate that it is rigorous but relevant, challenging but respectful of what students already know, is deeply human work, and is where our team focuses.
The result is a workflow where AI accelerates structural and productive work and human expertise shapes it into something that serves the students it was designed for.
Q: What will AI mean for the future of how instructional designers work with faculty in online course development?
A: It will dramatically change the texture of those conversations for the better. Currently, a significant part of the interaction time is spent gathering information: What are your learning goals? How is the assessment relevant? Where are the gaps? AI can do a lot of that diagnostic work upfront, so when a learning designer sits down with a faculty member, they’re not starting from scratch. They come with evidence, a shared reference and specific questions to discuss.
That actually creates an opportunity for a deeper partnership. Faculty are subject matter experts; learning designers are experts in pedagogy and online learning environments. When AI handles much of the foundation of the process, both sides of that collaboration can spend more time doing what they’re really good at. Collaboration becomes less about knowledge gathering and more about intellectual co-creation, which is where the most rewarding course design work happens.
AI will also help learning designers become active advisors. Instead of reacting to what faculty has brought to the table, they will be able to enter the conversation already identifying potential disagreements or concerns about accessibility, as well as suggesting activities and assessment strategies based on course objectives and known faculty preferences. That changes the dynamic in a healthy way from a service provider to a strategic thinking partner. It also helps accelerate scale, allowing learning designers to be more successful.
Q: One of our community’s concerns is that AI will eventually replace the work done by instructional designers, media educators and educational specialists in online courses and programs. How are each of you responding to those concerns, and what should we non-faculty educators in the online learning space do to prepare for the coming AI tsunami?
A: We take that concern seriously and do not think it deserves a dismissive response. Any serious discussion about AI in our field must acknowledge that some tasks that currently require human time and technology will be automated. That is true. The question is what do we do with that fact.
Our view is that AI will not replace the judgment, relational intelligence and contextual expertise that great learning designers and education professionals bring to their work. What it will do is eliminate tolerance for groups that don’t use it. If your value proposition fulfills a checklist of process tasks, aligning manual research, formatting course templates and generating an initial draft of learning objectives, those tasks will be done faster and cheaper with an AI-assisted workflow. That is the point of pressure.
What AI can do is build trust with a nervous faculty member who has never taught online before. It cannot navigate the organizational politics of curriculum change. It is unable to integrate a deep understanding of the discipline, population and teaching framework and make a decision about how it should fit together and be used in the human world. Those are deep human abilities.
Another practical piece of advice is this: Invest in your professional identity as a learning strategist, not just a productivity specialist. Make good use of AI tools, not to protect them, but to use them. Improve your negotiation skills. Strengthen your ability to connect instructional decisions to institutional outcomes that matter to administrators and faculty. The experts who will succeed are those who can say, with confidence, “I use AI to work faster, here’s thinking and expertise that AI can’t replicate.”
The tsunami metaphor is apt in one way: You don’t survive the waves by standing still. But talented people who learn to go with it will go further than ever.
