How Maryville Leverages AI to Enhance the Online Learning Experience

What to know about the role of AI in your Maryville education:

• AI is revolutionizing higher education, especially in areas like learner support, personalized education pathways, research, productivity, and writing assistance.
• Maryville University is a leader in implementing AI and other related technologies in the classroom, investing $21 million into the technology in 2024.
• Maryville students have access to a variety of AI-powered apps, tools, and resources designed to help them get the most out of their education.

The intelligent implementation of AI tools and similar cutting-edge technology has been a priority for Maryville University in recent years, most notably exhibited through a $21 million multi-year investment in 2024. As a result, the learner experience is improving and evolving almost every semester as new resources for student success are added and expanded.

The investment underscores a commitment years in the making through which Maryville continues to find smart, intentional ways to enhance the education experience using AI and related resources.

In just the last few years, learners have noticed an uptick in the number of resources available to help them achieve more in the classroom.

Nong Vong, a recent graduate of our online Doctor of Nursing Practice program, has seen the expansion of AI in the learning environment firsthand since she began her program.

“When I started the program, AI had not been so much into play, but toward the end of my program, yes, there is some AI for sure,” she says. “[Now] we can ask questions directly, and there will be information provided for us. There’s a bunch of apps in the app portal that supported schooling, so it helped a lot.”

With chatbots to answer learner questions on the fly 24/7, research resources to enhance brainstorming and planning, academic tools to provide writing assistance and boost productivity, and even responsive learning paths personalized to each student’s performance and needs, learners at Maryville have access to a state-of-the-art education experience designed to help them succeed.

Education is transformational, and at Maryville, we believe it starts with building a strong learning experience. Here’s a look at how AI is evolving the classroom for online and on-campus students alike, empowering them to maximize their outcomes and accomplish more.

One of the most direct and apparent platforms through which learners may encounter AI-enabled learning is You.com, which serves as a conversation-based one-stop resource for productivity and academic enhancement. All students, faculty, and staff can access You.com via their official Maryville accounts.

The platform provides a secure environment in which users can utilize advanced research and summarization tools, brainstorm and draft ideas, get on-demand writing assistance, and discover other ways to improve productivity and academic performance.

If you’re a Maryville student, you can access You.com by logging into your Okta Dashboard, navigating to “My Apps,” and clicking the You.com icon.

Maryville students also have access to apps like Grammarly that help them edit, refine, and perfect their projects. These tools give students a variety of ways they can approach a given assignment, serving to complement and heighten the knowledge and work they have already put in — not to replace the human effort.

As 2025 DNP graduate Cynthia Robinson explains, it’s about using AI to produce the highest-quality work possible: “My idea is this, so how could I polish it up? So that really helps.”

Student support and advising can be an area of frustration for learners, particularly during busy times, such as the days leading up to enrollment or financial aid deadlines. But most learners have quick questions with easily defined answers — they just need a nudge in the right direction.

To help resolve this and enhance the support experience, Maryville partnered with the AI customer service platform Capacity to create Max, an AI-empowered chatbot capable of handling the vast majority of learner inquiries. Max is available any time students need assistance, giving our human support team more bandwidth to help provide direct assistance and tackle more complex questions — and augmenting Maryville’s ability to serve even during nights and weekends.

As Max’s knowledge base grows each day, the chatbot is able to provide more helpful, relevant information to learners. Each month, Max handles some 6,000 inquiries from more than 300 learners, answering 97% of them within seconds.

A more situational use of AI that may nonetheless be transformational for learners involves helping customize individual students’ paths through coursework.

One such example is the use of the Assessment and Learning in Knowledge Spaces (ALEKS) system, which dynamically guides learners on an optimized path through their mathematics classes. Based on AI-enabled analysis of their individual mastery, learners will be given only the lessons for which they’re prepared, with some progressing on an accelerated track and others given more deliberately paced coursework.

“In a traditional setting, the course is fixed. If you learn it, that’s it. If you don’t learn it, that’s it,” explains Dushanthi Herath, PhD, an assistant professor of mathematics at Maryville. “It can be a struggle. With ALEKS, students can solve a problem, and if they make a mistake, they can go through the steps carefully and learn how to solve the problem. Also, they can try out another similar problem. It helps them practice and learn to solve a problem at their own pace.”

In the end, branching paths through coursework allow learners who complete the course to earn appropriate credit based on their individual path. For example, learners who sign up for the same mathematics class may receive credit for either College Algebra (MATH 117) or College Algebra and Trigonometry (MATH 125) based on the optimized content they completed. That means each learner gets the mathematics foundation that best fits their needs, mastery, and outcomes.

“From our experience, students underperforming in MATH 125 may perform better in the slower-paced MATH 117,” explains Sharmila Sivalingam, PhD, an assistant professor of mathematics. “On the other hand, students breezing through MATH 117 may benefit from the challenge of completing MATH 125.”

In our library — and in other areas in which learners may need to do research or perform advanced search functions — AI enables a cleaner, easier, and more intuitive interface that can directly connect learners with the answers they need.

When Amber Spratlin, a library research and instruction specialist, noticed Maryville students often went to Google rather than to the library’s Discovery Search feature for their top-layer research, she saw an opportunity.

She began researching learners’ concerns and needs, so she could implement technological solutions that addressed them and built a better user experience.

“Positive user feedback ... led me to ask the next question: What makes Google so much more usable than the library’s discovery layer?” she says. “There are many answers, but it boils down to natural language processing. Google does it well, and library systems still don’t.”

By working with developers and Maryville’s AI committee, Amber was able to implement tech-forward tools and plugins like Lean Library and AI-enabled search features, creating a more research-friendly experience for library users.

Maryville’s faculty members also have begun using AI platforms like Synthesia to create new video and avatar-driven content at scale.

This allows educators to build more relevant content faster, meaning they can update lectures, syllabi, and course content more dynamically than ever. Faculty members across programs and degree types have already successfully implemented more than 85 videos built with the AI toolset.

As the technology continues to improve, more use cases are emerging, with Maryville’s teams planning to employ AI videos and avatar-based content throughout relevant apps and learning platforms.

As prevalent as AI tools and resources are, the technology is still young, and future growth and refinement will only make it more useful in empowering learners to reach their full potential. Maryville University is proud to lead the charge in implementing AI in the classroom and throughout the learning experience.

• AI productivity and research resources help learners complete more work faster.
• AI search and interface tools give users a more intuitive experience in daily tasks.
• AI assistants help smooth the potential frustrations associated with navigating administrative tasks or seeking support.
• AI learning platforms connect learners in real time with the best course content for their needs, goals, and abilities.

AI is one of the biggest innovations of our time, and Maryville’s embrace and adoption of these tools is in line with our history of pushing boundaries and leading the charge in technological adoption.

“By leveraging a comprehensive data strategy and the capabilities of the Maryville Collective, the university is poised to revolutionize the academic landscape and set a new standard for personalized education,” says Phil Komarny, chief innovation officer at Maryville.

It’s all in service of helping learners like you achieve your educational and professional goals with unprecedented support and resources for success.

Ready to take the next step in your nursing education? Discover how Maryville can help you be brave and pursue your educational and professional goals in nursing backed by personalized support from application through graduation. Check out our online nursing degrees and certificates, or schedule a call with an advisor to learn more.