What if every course could offer students an always-available virtual teaching assistant designed around the instructor’s content, expectations, and teaching approach?
Faculty from across the University of Maryland School of Nursing and the University of Maryland, Baltimore are invited to explore that possibility at the 35th anniversary Summer Institute in Nursing Informatics (SINI), taking place July 16 - 17 at UMSON.
During the special presentation, "Live with JAIMIE: The Virtual Teaching Assistant Framework Powering New AI Personas," attendees will meet JAIMIE, an immersive, multimodal virtual teaching assistant already implemented in doctoral nursing education and expanding to additional programs this fall. The highly interactive session will feature a face-to-face avatar demonstration and show how JAIMIE supports course navigation, assignment guidance, and access to learning resources.
Attendees will also get a behind-the-scenes look at the no-code retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, architecture that powers JAIMIE. Building on last year’s SINI Custom GPT workshop, the session will demonstrate how the same framework can be adapted to create purpose-built AI personas for academic advising, clinical simulation, patient support, and other educational and clinical workflows.
Virtual teaching assistants were one of three recommendations from the UMB Teaching and Learning AI Task Force and are now being considered for broader adoption. Faculty will leave with a practical understanding of how this model could support:
- course and assignment navigation
- frequently asked questions
- rubric and expectation clarification
- more consistent access to course-specific guidance
- reduced repetitive questions for faculty
- purpose-built AI personas for education, advising, simulation, and patient support.
The JAIMIE presentation is part of a broader two-day SINI program featuring sessions on AI governance, data stewardship, patient engagement, clinical innovation, informatics education, and the evolving role of nurses in AI-enabled health systems.
University of Maryland faculty receive a discounted conference registration rate. Faculty are encouraged to register early and join colleagues from across UMB and the nursing informatics community for this milestone 35th anniversary celebration.
SINI 2026
Thursday, July 16 - Friday, July 17
In person at the University of Maryland School of Nursing
655 W. Lombard St.