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Journal of Online Mentoring

ORCID

Villena, Anna Liza D., https://orcid.org/0009-0000-5317-490X

Digital Object Identifier

10.5590/JOM.2026.2.1003

Abstract

The integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) into higher education has arrived faster than the support structures designed to help faculty navigate it. This article reflects on one faculty member’s experience providing informal AI integration mentoring to nursing colleagues at Walden University, a fully asynchronous online graduate nursing program, where clinician-educators with deep disciplinary expertise often struggled to recognize that expertise as an asset in their interactions with AI tools.

Drawing on Rogers’ (2003) diffusion of innovations theory, the article describes the mentoring approach that emerged from practice, the central insight that faculty are not failing to integrate AI because they lack technical skills but because they do not yet see their own knowledge as precisely what AI requires, and the principles that guided subsequent mentoring conversations. It also examines the limits of informal practice as a source of generalizable knowledge and describes the formal research study that grew from those limits. I argue that effective AI integration support must be grounded in faculty expertise rather than faculty deficits, asynchronous mentoring requires deliberate design, and the distance between reflective practice and systematic inquiry is one that scholar-practitioners are uniquely positioned to close.

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