OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT) – A group of Creighton University computer science students is building an artificial intelligence chatbot to help graduate nursing students to get through one of their toughest courses.
Students on the nurse practitioner track at Creighton University must take advanced pharmacology.
“Whether you’re going to be taking care of the tiniest of babies or the oldest individuals, and the very sick in the hospital setting, we know that it is so important to have good management skills. In order to do that, you need to know these medications,” said Lindsay Iverson, DNP, associate professor in the College of Nursing at Creighton University.
Iverson has taught the course for ten years and said it’s notoriously challenging. Graduate nurse practitioner student, Anne Taylor, took the class a few semesters ago.
“It involves a lot of memorization of different drug classes, how do the drugs work, when do you use them and who do you use them on,” said Taylor.
After watching many of her students struggle with the material, Professor Iverson reached out to Dr. Steven Fernandes, assistant professor of computer science.
They applied for and received a grant from the National Science Foundation’s National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Pilot Classroom initiative. With it, they are creating a chatbot to serve as an interactive tutoring tool for the students to access 24/7.
Once complete, the chatbot will be able to generate practice questions and walk students through material they are having trouble comprehending. Students can talk or type their questions, and the bot will respond both verbally and in writing.
“So they’re not emailing us at two in the morning and not getting an answer. They can log in, interact with that chatbot, get that immediate response that they need, and move on with their studying,” said Iverson.
They’re calling it RX24 and it’s currently being built by eleven of Dr. Fernades’ students.
“One of the important concepts here is you have a usual classroom assignment, where you complete the assignment and you’re done, but in this case, you have a deployable AI model. When I say deployable, anyone will be able to access the model, will be able to see how it works, and will be able to interact with it,” said Dr. Fernades.
Senior computer science student Samantha Phillips is designing documents to upload to the chatbot using the pharmacology course’s textbook, review questions and exams.
Prior to this, she didn’t know much about AI. “This still has opened a whole new inspiration for me in something I never thought I’d be interested in,” said Phillips.
The next step is to train the bot by asking it questions. For help with that, they’ve recruited nursing students.
“I’m just excited to continue building and working with everyone, the nursing students, the computer science students, so that we can come up with a product that we’re happy about. I’m also looking forward to seeing the students’ reactions to it. Hopefully it really is helpful for them,” said Phillips.
Students who have already taken the course, including Taylor, are confident it will.
“We used the internet a lot if there was something that we couldn’t quite grasp. So, having this sort of support built into the course, I think it will make it that much better for students moving forward,” said Taylor.
Named after nurses who work and study around the clock, RX24 should be ready by the spring.
Dr. Fernades and previous computer science students have built eight or so other chatbots for the schools of nursing, pharmacy, and medicine.
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