Project · Live in the Faculty Development Hub

AI Video Communication Training Live

Faculty rehearse difficult mentoring conversations with an AI-simulated mentee — face to face, out loud, in real time — and get a structured formative debrief minutes later.

How a session works

The flow is pick → brief → live → debrief:

• Pick a scenario — current cases include aligning expectations with a struggling graduate mentee and giving difficult feedback to a junior colleague, with more in development (self-advocacy and boundary-setting "mentoring up" scenarios).
• Brief — the faculty member reads the setup and their goals for the conversation.
• Live — a real-time spoken video conversation with an AI mentee: a video avatar with a conversational voice agent playing a carefully scripted persona designed to make the faculty member actually practice the hard parts, not to be agreeable.
• Debrief — a separate AI coach reads the transcript and returns per-dimension ratings (met / partially met / not yet / not observed) with evidence quoted from the transcript, one concrete suggestion per dimension, suggested phrases, a summary of what the mentee needed, and a printable handout.

Grounded in mentoring competencies

The debrief rubric is behaviorally anchored, dimension by dimension, to published mentoring competencies from CIMER (the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research). One point of rigor we insist on: CIMER's validated instrument is a self-assessment survey, not an observational rubric — so we describe this tool accurately as a new practice instrument aligned to those competencies, used formatively, rather than claiming it administers the validated instrument itself.

Privacy and design notes

• Persona scripts never reach the browser; sessions are server-minted and bound to a single-use token.
• Debriefs are stored as formative practice records only — this is a rehearsal space, not an evaluation of faculty.
• All data flows follow the Hub's 30-day privacy rule.

Why it matters

Communication skills degrade without deliberate practice, and realistic practice partners are the scarcest resource in faculty development. An always-available simulated mentee with a competency-aligned debrief turns a scheduling problem into a five-minute practice habit — and gives us a research platform for studying how faculty communication skills respond to AI-mediated rehearsal.