With the help of two federal grants, Moraine Valley Community College is looking to be a leader in efforts to include artificial intelligence in teaching and improve guidance for students interested in cybersecurity careers.
Cybersecurity professor John Sands said over the past few years, he has been tasked with watching closely the potential impacts of AI on the Palos Hills community college’s offerings and curricula.
“As I had to sort of educate myself with AI, I found that really this is a technology that is going to impact every program that we offer,” Sands said.
Most recently, Sands helped the college win a $1 million grant to help faculty across disciplines become familiar with AI and apply it in the classroom. He said each year, ensuring students are trained in the ways AI is being incorporated into their careers of interest becomes more important.
“I just sort of see the writing on the wall and I knew this was something that, as an institution, we really need to start dealing with,” Sands said.
The National Science Foundation funded Moraine Valley’s Leveraging Artificial Intelligence Skills in Community College Classrooms and Technical Careers award, which will allow Sands to coordinate workshops for a cohort of faculty across disciplines.
These workshops demonstrate how certain AI programs aid teaching and the importance of instituting ethical guidelines for student use. Sands said professors are already using AI in creative ways to engage students, such as in a history class where last week he helped set up a virtual guest speaker powered by AI.
“So we had George Washington come into class and the students could literally ask him questions,” Sands said. “He could answer their questions based on historical data that we gave it.”
Kristine Christensen, Moraine Valley professor of computer information systems, teaches a technology class Oct. 15, 2025. Christensen is leading a grant to provide guidance on cybersecurity careers for students. (Moraine Valley Community College)
Another grant provided through the National Science Foundation focuses on cybersecurity and guiding students interested in related careers.
While Moraine Valley offers a cybersecurity program, the college’s career counselors and academic advisors need more education and resources on the diverse job opportunities available to students, professor Kristine Christensen said.
“We noticed that a lot of the career counselors and advisers didn’t know what cybersecurity was,” Christensen said. “This common misconception of a hoodie and a hacker and a white van outside your house — there’s way more than that.”
While Sands’ grant focuses on faculty training, Christensen said the $900,000 cybersecurity grant will help her and others create a cybersecurity toolkit for college employees and more resources for interested students and their parents.
“If they know their options from the start, then they can be very successful and intentional with where they want to go,” Christensen said about students looking to pursue cyber careers.
Christensen also hopes to design workshops to engage students still in high school about potential pathways into cybersecurity careers. She said these include personality inventories that identify roles that fit with students’ interests along with games that allow students to flex skills that are important to careers in cybersecurity.
There are currently more than 500,000 open positions in cybersecurity roles across the country, according to jobseeker tool Cyber Seek.
“We want to produce the best workforce we can,” Christensen said.
ostevens@chicagotribune.com
