Generative AI is changing how knowledge is accessed, synthesized, and applied. Meridian University is integrating AI into graduate education while intensifying the human engagement at the center of transformative learning: an approach that is both high AI and high touch.
Our Approach
Transformative Learning in the Age of AI
Meridian's graduate programs integrate transformative learning with informational learning. Informational learning builds knowledge. Transformative learning changes how a person perceives, relates, and acts, and it is cultivated through experience, reflection, and relationship within a learning community.Generative AI is reshaping informational learning. It can retrieve, summarize, and synthesize knowledge at a scale no individual can match, but it cannot undergo transformation on a student's behalf. Meridian is integrating AI throughout informational learning while keeping transformative learning at the center of its programs.
“The material has been challenging but also supportive. It’s not just information that you forget, because it really is transforming the substance of who I am.”
Context
Opportunity and Risk
AI offers unprecedented access to human knowledge.
In law, medicine, and global health, AI is already changing how expert knowledge is retrieved, synthesized, and applied. Its implications for learning are comparable. Many students already use these tools fluently; the educational task is to direct that fluency toward deeper learning.AI can erode the capacities education exists to develop.
A growing body of research raises concern that routine cognitive offloading to AI may diminish sustained attention, independent reasoning, and the capacity to think through writing. The concern is not the use of AI as such, but the uncritical delegation of thinking to it. Meridian treats this risk as seriously as the opportunity.Design Principle
High AI, High Touch
Meridian's response to both is a single design principle: the more fully AI is integrated into learning, the more deliberately Meridian intensifies the forms of human engagement that AI cannot provide.
High AI
AI-Integrated Informational Learning
Meridian embraces AI and leverages it in service of its mission. Students use AI openly and critically to conduct research, synthesize sources, test ideas, and access bodies of knowledge that once required extensive library work.Courses engage AI tools directly, with students and faculty exploring them together and reflecting on what each reveals, what it obscures, and how it shapes the way we think.High Touch
Intensified Human Engagement
Meridian is intensifying in-person and real-time engagement: more face-to-face learning, more synchronous dialogue, and more direct collaboration among peers. Students meet with classmates live, practice together, and exchange feedback in real time, whether online, at the Los Angeles Campus, or at Transformative Learning Labs.These are the conditions under which transformative learning occurs, and under which capacities such as presence, discernment, empathy, and embodied judgment develop.
“It’s really incredible the way that we form these standing practice groups with other classmates outside of the classwork, where in a way you’re able to practice both being a clinician and a client.”
For Students