It helps students ask questions about instructor-approved course materials. It can explain concepts, help students find relevant information, and point them toward an appropriate next step. It does not replace the instructor or make academic decisions.
Students can access the Virtual Teaching Assistant from within the course experience in:
The assistant uses approved course files from the LMS, so students can get help without leaving the environment they already use for the course.
The assistant’s course knowledge can be updated from the approved files in the LMS as those materials change. During pilot planning, your team confirms which content is included, how updates are handled, and what happens when a file is removed or replaced.
Like any AI system, it can make mistakes. The pilot should test representative student questions, keep answers grounded in the selected course materials, and give the assistant a clear response when the available content does not support an answer. Faculty review remains essential.
The instructor defines what the assistant may help with and where the boundaries are. It should support understanding, navigation, and practice—not complete graded work for students or override the instructor’s course policies.
The instructor selects the course materials, defines the assistant’s purpose, reviews how it responds, and identifies questions that should be directed to a person. The pilot can be refined based on what the instructor and students experience.
The pilot should use only the access and student information required for the approved course experience. The exact data, permissions, retention rules, and review process should be defined with your LMS, privacy, security, and academic teams before students receive access.
Your institution controls which courses use the assistant, which materials it can access, who can use it, and what it is allowed to help students with. Role-based access, instructor-defined guardrails, activity records, faculty review, and human escalation help keep the instructor in control.
Available review materials include:
The relevant requirements depend on the course, the student information involved, and your institution’s deployment and data-retention policies.
Review answer quality, source grounding, the questions students ask, where the assistant needs correction, and whether faculty and students find the experience useful. The goal is to learn from one course before deciding whether the assistant should be refined, expanded, or stopped.