“We need to understand how AI is impacting education and examine this technology critically,” said Mohan Paturi, the grant’s lead principal investigator, a professor in the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering and affiliate of the UC San Diego Qualcomm Institute. “Our goal is to help students and provide a better educational experience. The team and I look forward to expanding collaborations across the UC San Diego campus and beyond. Together we are working to improve learning outcomes for students while providing teachers with innovative yet vetted ways of bringing AI into their teaching.”
At UC San Diego, starting in Fall 2025, the AI Tutor pilot project will be carefully incorporated into to an upper division genetics course in the School of Biological Sciences and into an entry level programming course within the Halicioglu Data Science Institute, which is part of the School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences at UC San Diego.
This AI tutor is based on large language models created by OpenAI and Anthropic, two leading AI companies. But researchers developed software that acts as guardrails to make sure the tool works as intended, for example by not doing the students’ work for them. Unlike off-the-shelf AI tutors available commercially, the AI tutor that the research team is developing wraps around each instructor’s teaching materials and philosophy, Paturi said. And it will never simply give students the answer to a problem. The tutor can also “know” what the instructor taught in each specific session; has access to videos and podcasts from the course; and is aware of what homework is due.
“The project that professor Paturi leads is unique in its focus on building practical AI-based systems and tools that can be used at scale in real classroom settings,” said Sorin Lerner, professor and chair in the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering and one of the grant’s co-principal investigators. “This demonstrates how the Computer Science and Engineering department is leading impactful work at the forefront of AI in education.”
A prototype for the pilot was first built as part of a workforce development program at the UC San Diego Qualcomm Institute. This past year, Paturi and colleagues ran a pilot program to test out the AI tutor in a few UC San Diego courses in nano engineering and computer programming. Students widely praised the tool in their reviews.
link