You enter the exam room. The patient in front of you, a 68-year-old male, is here because he feels dizzy and short of breath. You note his resting heart rate is elevated — 108 beats per minute. He has had a bad cold for a few days, he explains between shallow gasps, but didn’t think it was anything serious. What do you do next?
If you’re a University of South Carolina nursing student in one of associate professor Stephanie Schaller’s classes, this scenario may look like one you’ve encountered while using Study Navigator. Schaller, a 2026-2027 Provost’s AI Teaching Fellow, designed the custom artificial intelligence-enhanced study tool to bridge the gap between the concepts students memorize in school and the actual decision making that happens in clinical practice.
Study Navigator is just one way Schaller is bringing knowledge to life in the classroom. In her clinical reasoning escape rooms, student teams solve puzzles in a fast-paced, choose-your-own-adventure style competition. She also co-developed the CardioEducator, a 3D-printed heart with interchangeable pieces to help students visualize congenital defects. Now patented, the CardioEducatorTM was a finalist in the 2026 Manufacturing Madness: The Coolest Thing Made in South Carolina competition and a finalist in the 2025 South Carolina InnoVision Awards’ education category.
Schaller’s efforts have been recognized with a 2026 Garnet Apple Award for Teaching Innovation from USC’s Center for Teaching Excellence. Below, she shares more about Study Navigator and her strategies for improving classroom engagement.
Study Navigator as a digital study buddy
The College of Nursing has the brightest nursing students, but they struggle sometimes once they get into the upper division because they're used to memorizing materials and they're used to getting great grades. However, now we are asking them to apply their knowledge to real-world situations which can be a difficult transition. That’s why this AI study tool was needed. It's basically a study buddy.
The students go to the custom ChatGPT site. And it says to them, ‘Hey, what are you wanting to study today?’ And they will put in something like asthma. ‘Is it a pediatric patient or an adult patient?’ The AI tool will make a case study, and it'll say, ‘Is this patient stable or unstable?’ And they have to recognize those cues. If the patient is unstable, it'll say, ‘What is the first thing that you want to do to help this patient?’ The AI tool will adjust the case scenario based on student responses. Once they stabilize the patient, Study Navigator will ask what other areas the student would like to study, such as complications, pathophysiology, compare/contrast or education.
Preparing tomorrow’s nurses to think critically
Study Navigator helps students dive deeper into their reasoning by examining different aspects of a condition. When they are studying, a lot of times they just want to rewrite slides or rewrite notes, but they're not trying to apply it, and that's what we emphasize during their clinical rotations and how we formulate exam questions. Our state boards will have many clinical situations, and they have to make decisions during those exams. So I'm trying to get them to think critically and learn how to make sound judgements.
“I love it when students are using the heart model or Study Navigator and I can see the light bulb come on, that ‘Oh, I get it!’ moment. To me, that’s what teaching is about.”
Now, sometimes Study Navigator might give information that contradicts what is best practice — not often, but it can. I'm trying to teach students how to validate information. As nurse educators, we do not want our students to overly rely on AI but understand how to work with AI tools. AI tools will be a part of nursing and will make a lot of clinical judgments about things, and as nurses they will need to make sure that assessment is correct. You don't want to do something just because a tool told you that you needed to. We want them to validate findings and think through this process, and exposing them to AI tools in nursing school is a starting point.
They're already using AI to help them study. But Study Navigator focuses on Socratic questioning to help students look for themes and go deeper into their understanding. At the end of their Study Navigator session, the tool will outline their weaknesses and then develop NCLEX questions based on that study scenario and what content was their weakest.
Interactive learning is the future
As a nursing faculty member, I'm constantly looking for innovative, hands-on ways to help students engage with difficult material. I developed CardioEducator, a 3D-printed heart model, because I saw students struggling to translate abstract cardiac concepts into clinical understanding. I developed Study Navigator because my students didn't know how to study like a nurse. They could memorize content but not apply it. That's where I see nursing education heading. This generation of students craves less passive content delivery and more interactive multimodal tools.
I love it when students are using the heart model or Study Navigator and I can see the light bulb come on, that ‘Oh, I get it!’ moment. To me, that’s what teaching is about. Or a former student comes back and tells me, ‘I'm a pediatric nurse now because I loved your course and my pediatric rotation.’ As educators, we often don’t hear about the impact we’ve had until much later. It takes time for students to recognize what a course actually gave them. But when they appreciate later what you were working on getting them to understand, it means so much to see those fruits of your labor.