Harnessing AI and Learning Design to Strengthen Police Training

* Editor’s note: Since this interview, Jen Whiting and two collaborators were awarded a total of $10,500 for continued development of the AI/O platform at the 2026 Cozad New Venture Challenge. AI/O provides scalable, scenario-based training that enables officers to repeatedly practice and refine their communication skills, improving decision-making, safety, and outcomes.

It’s 5 a.m. on a summer morning in 2023 at Gies Memorial Stadium. The sun has yet to peek over the trees east of campus. Whiting, alongside about 100 others, is running up the five-story-tall spiral concrete ramps inside the corners of the building. As anyone who’s ever had tickets in the east balcony will tell you, it’s a workout to walk up those ramps—let alone running at a full sprint. Quads ache. Lungs burn. The group gulps for air as they start their day.

But Whiting isn’t doing this because she’s simply dedicated to her fitness routine.

She’s completing her Ph.D. in Learning and Design Leadership this fall from the College of Education. And as part of her research, Whiting decided to go through the entire 640-hour training regimen of the University of Illinois’ Police Training Institute (PTI).

She was in every class. Every instructional setting. Every physical training session. Observing ways to make it more accessible to today’s recruit.

“Police training is constrained by the state curriculum. We can’t change the curriculum. But we can adapt how we deliver it,” Whiting says.

An Unexpected Calling

Whiting started her Ph.D. in Learning Design and Leadership during the pandemic. In 2023, she came to campus to do her in-person coursework and research.

One of her early research projects involved collecting data at PTI. From that moment on, she says she “fell in love” with the law-enforcement training environment. The challenge of developing a curriculum for the wide variety of educational levels and student backgrounds that come through the institute intrigued Whiting.

She didn’t come to Champaign-Urbana with the idea that she’d be fully immersed in police training. “I thought I was going to be studying prison education, but then I took a class from Rebecca Ginsberg, and she taught me about the history of prison,” says Whiting. “It really changed my viewpoint on how we make changes as educators.”

Whiting, along with her advisor, Education Policy, Organization & Leadership professor William Cope, wanted to collaborate with PTI on research and curriculum-focused initiatives that examine instructional effectiveness and professional learning in law enforcement training.

“These efforts have included a comprehensive curriculum review aligned with federal training standards, as well as applied research on improving police report writing and communication,” says Cope.

As time went on, Whiting felt she needed to get closer to the program.  She proposed to PTI leadership that she be allowed to join the training program and complete it, just like every other trainee.

Whiting joined a class of 100 other recruits and fully immersed herself in the training. Physical training, control tactic training, and lectures. Everywhere the recruits went, there was Whiting.

“I had an inventory form, and every five minutes, I would just check off what was happening,” says Whiting. “What were the recruits doing? What type of instruction was at play? What artifacts were at play?”

She collected data and set out to analyze it to see where improvements could be made.

Enhanced Training Techniques

When Whiting observed the classroom training and instruction at PTI, she noted it was very traditional. Lecture-heavy. Hours of reading to be absorbed. With recruits bringing the gamut of learning and life experiences with them to class, traditional methods didn’t always resonate.

Lin Chen, assistant professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, notes that many adult learners struggle with reading.

“In the United States, about 54% of adults read below a sixth-grade level,” says Chen.  “Understanding how people read, and why reading sometimes breaks down, is therefore essential for improving reading instruction and support.”

So the question became: how could the material be changed to help students learn this dense material better?

First, Whiting suggested “flipping” the classroom and introducing more multimodal learning elements to make it less lecture-heavy and more reflection- and activity-based.

This included developing video content to review and incorporating podcasts to help students review and retain key information.

PTI used the University Library video studio, which is equipped with various camera angles, especially overhead, that aren’t readily available. The videos served as study guides after training so the students could review and learn from their performance, much like an athlete watching game tape.

Second, Whiting connected Dr. Chen with the leadership at PTI to plan how to better understand reading comprehension using eye tracking software with Chen’s assistance. A collaborative research project was launched in 2026.

“In this project, we are recording PTI recruits’ eye movements while they read textbook passages,” says Chen. “Using machine-learning methods, we develop a predictive framework that helps explain how differences among readers and features of the text contribute to reading difficulty. This work will help us better understand how reading challenges arise and how instruction can be better tailored to individual needs.”

Low-Stakes Failures in High-Risk Scenarios

As a police officer, training for every scenario is practically impossible. Interviewing skills are taught and practiced over and over, but in some cases, officers must deal with interview scenarios that cannot be perfectly replicated.

“For instance, right now in our country, no law enforcement officer has ever conducted child interview training with an actual child,” says Whiting. “They've read about it, they've pretended, they’ve role-played. But you can't hire an 8-year-old and have them pretend they were sexually abused. It’s not ethical.”

“But with AI and specific multi-layer, validated personas, we can build that environment, and we can embed into the neural network the elements of a juvenile who has experienced whatever situation you want to have them play out,” she says.

Whiting says that this approach can also be used to help train officers to interview people who have a difficult time communicating, like those with autism disorders or Alzheimer’s disease.

The AI tools allow PTI students to learn through practice in a low-stakes environment before they go out into a high-stakes, real environment. Whiting says that the practice allows for a critical learning experience.

“We were having a lab session on this, and one guy was like, ‘Ah, screw it, I'm out.’ And I asked, ‘What happened?’ He was five minutes into an interaction that usually takes about half an hour. And he said, ‘I screwed it up. I know I'm going to have to spend 20 minutes regaining their trust. I'm just going to start again.’”

“That reflection is critical,” she says, “We want low-stakes failures in high-risk training environments.  And that's what this allows us to do.”

Getting practice reps with the AI tools also allows PTI students to practice their wording and approach to build “muscle memory” to lighten the cognitive load during an interaction. This allows recruits to focus more on the interview at hand and less on the structure of their wording.

Back to Basics with BluePen

For all the tools that officers have at their disposal, there is one they rely on more than others. It’s not their handcuffs, flashlight, or radio.

It’s their pen.

Writing is a skill that is crucial to police work. Officers have very few interactions with people that are not documented in some way. What and how things are written down is very important.

“They're going to spend hours a day writing,” Whiting says. “The police report is really the voice of the person they interviewed. It represents what happened to the victim, and anything that the officer found out. The report will represent them forever. Many officers are called to testify years after an incident. And they're going to go back and look at their police report to remember what happened.”

But not all recruits have the same level of education. Some have college degrees, others don’t. Ages range from 20 all the way into the mid-50s. This leads to a wide swath of skill levels and fluencies.

“We introduced something for report writing that is common in police training, but not so common as in college classes. There's a remedial track,” says Whiting.

Similar to weapons training for someone of below-average firearms skill, the remedial writing track places trainees with a special instructor to coach them.

Whiting has been working on developing the learning design for the writing remedial track.

“We’ve developed a program here called BluePen, where there are little baby steps that they take to help them learn narrative writing, to help them learn grammar and punctuation,” she says. “What everybody needs is different. And what the remedial program gets to focus on is ‘what is it that you need?’”

From Collaborative Research to Practice

For many of the researchers involved, having a resource on campus like the Police Training Institute is a welcome addition.

Chen says the institute gives her access to a broader spectrum of research subjects.

“Having a research partner like the PTI allows us to include a much wider range of readers beyond our typical participants, who are often college students,” she says. “PTI being located on campus makes data collection and study coordination more efficient, allowing the research to be conducted smoothly and effectively.”

Cope sees the opportunity for many university researchers to conduct research at PTI with real-world impact.

“It allows for meaningful collaboration between practitioners and scholars in education, psychology, design, and data science—connections that would be difficult to replicate elsewhere,” says Cope. “PTI provides a real-world learning environment where research questions are grounded in practice and where findings can be tested, refined, and applied in authentic settings.”

PTI’s willingness to collaborate on research is one of the reasons that Whiting says she is so drawn to police training. The institute partners with researchers from units across campus, including Computer Science, the College of Media, Grainger Engineering, Kinesiology, Anthropology, and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. 

“It's a really fascinating educational environment. And PTI was welcoming of research, and wanted input,” says Whiting. “They wanted me to reflect back to them as an educator what I see. We've made a lot of adaptations in the last few years, and they're eager to make what happens at PTI stronger and to have improvements across the field.”

Innovating to Improve Communities

While Whiting wraps up her Ph.D. program this fall, it doesn’t mean she’s done with PTI.

“I'm not in this to get another job, right? I'm in this to research and to make a difference,” says Whiting. “Being a researcher is a legitimate role. And PTI has offered to keep me on to continue to coordinate this work. Because they want to be known as a research center nationally.”

As Whiting’s advisor, Cope knows that her passion for police training and curriculum will bear fruit.

“One aspect I particularly value is her ability to translate educational theory into practical tools,” he says. “Overall, her work reflects a sustained and thoughtful effort to understand how education shapes professional practice and how training environments can be improved in ways that benefit both officers and the communities they serve.”