We surveyed 28 nursing faculty from two universities and asked them what teaching strategies produce lasting knowledge retention.
They nailed it.
Case studies, simulation, low-stakes quizzing, group discussion, interactive questioning, structured gaming activities. The evidence-based techniques that cognitive science has validated for decades. Every faculty member could name them. Most could explain the mechanism. Several had read the same research.
Then we asked about barriers.
The number one answer, by a wide margin: time.
What “Not Enough Time” Actually Means
Not technology. Not student resistance. Not administrative pushback. Not skepticism about whether the methods work. Time.
Faculty don’t have the hours to build unfolding case studies, write weekly low-stakes quizzes with fresh questions each week, design simulation scenarios, and create the kind of layered, retrieval-heavy course structure that produces durable learning. Not while also maintaining clinical practices. Not while precepting students. Not while serving on curriculum committees, accreditation workgroups, and faculty governance bodies.
This isn’t a complaint. It’s a description. A nursing faculty member at a research university in 2026 carries a workload that was never designed to accommodate evidence-based course redesign as an ongoing practice. The job was expanded without the hours to match.
The research on retrieval practice is unambiguous. Students who are tested frequently on material retain it longer than students who re-read it. Every time. The effect size is large. The evidence has been accumulating for 30 years. Faculty know this. They’re not implementing it at scale because implementation requires building infrastructure, and infrastructure takes time that gets consumed by everything else the job requires.
The Gap This Creates
This is the gap that keeps me up at night.
The evidence is clear. The expertise is in the room. The will is there. Implementation is blocked by a resource problem that has nothing to do with knowledge or motivation.
It means that students graduate from programs taught by faculty who know exactly what kind of learning would have served them better. Faculty who, if given unlimited time, would design their courses completely differently. Faculty who are producing adequate graduates when they could be producing excellent ones, not because they don’t know better, but because knowing better and having the bandwidth to act on it are two separate things.
The research confirms what these faculty reported. Kitt-Lewis and colleagues found that faculty identify the same barriers: time, large class sizes, insufficient support infrastructure. Mechtel’s group found similar results. The pattern is consistent enough that it stops being a personal limitation and starts being a structural one.
Structures can be changed.
What Changes the Calculation
AI changes the time equation. Not by removing the expertise requirement. Not by making pedagogically sound content easier to get right on the first pass. Getting AI-generated educational content right still requires clinical depth, pedagogical judgment, and the willingness to iterate through multiple drafts.
What it compresses is the distance between having a good idea and having a usable product.
A branching case study that takes four hours to build from scratch can be scaffolded in an hour and refined from there. A set of weekly retrieval questions for pharmacology content that takes two hours of writing can be generated and reviewed in 30 minutes. The expert judgment is still required. The blank page problem largely goes away.
When the blank page problem goes away, the course design problem becomes tractable. A faculty member who couldn’t previously afford to build retrieval-heavy weekly assessments can now build them. The hours shift from content generation to clinical judgment about whether the content is right, which is the part that required the expert in the first place.
The barrier was never knowledge. It was time. That’s the problem worth solving.
What’s the one evidence-based teaching strategy you’d implement tomorrow if you had five extra hours a week? Whatever you just thought of, that’s where to start.