Missed a lecture? This AI agent at Bar-Ilan University helps students catch up

"If you want the bot to be grounded in the material, you need to explain it because you want it to teach what you want to teach," he says. "So, I needed to rephrase the course materials and get detailed papers for it. If I want it to be my assistant, I need to teach it. So, I teach the bot what to learn, what to answer the students."

Oversight of the course materials is essential to ensure they can be relied on by the students as learning aids. This included feeding the AI agent transcripts of all his video lectures and expanding the bullet points on his slides with research papers and recommended reading. Then he painstakingly tested the agent's responses until he was satisfied with their accuracy.

So far, he has observed positive changes in his students since the AI learning tool was introduced. He says he fields fewer routine and administrative questions, and students are less nervous about examinations.

"They are more relaxed about exams now," he says. "Before, I would just upload old exam questions for them to revise. Now I ask them to ask the bot to generate an exam for them. So, they come to the exam more relaxed because they can generate more questions and do their own exams."

At the finals in August, the average score among his 50 or so students was three percentage points higher than in previous years - an outcome he concedes could also be due to a better-than-average cohort.