Give a course an AI tutor

When you're done, students can ask a Chirp about the lesson they're on, right beside it.

Who can do this: the account owner and editors, on the Academy plan.

Choose the tutor

1. If you don't have a Chirp for the job yet, create one. Tell it how to teach in its instructions, and add your course material as knowledge files if you like. It doesn't need to be published. If it is published, students get its published version, so publish the Chirp's changes when you change it.
2. Open the course and click Course details.
3. Under Tutor, choose the Chirp. Click Save details.

Any Chirp in the course's workspace can be the tutor. A module can have a different one (click the module in the outline and choose a Tutor for this module's lessons), and so can a single lesson (its Tutor menu). A lesson uses its own tutor if it has one, otherwise its module's, otherwise the course's.

If the course is already published, publish the changes so students get the new tutor.

What the tutor knows

In the course, the tutor answers with its own instructions and knowledge files, plus the course's outline and the text of the lesson the student is on (up to 30,000 characters). Videos, audio and files in the lesson reach it only by their titles: if the tutor should answer from a PDF or worksheet, add it to the Chirp's knowledge files too. It never sees quiz answers or other students. It can't change the course or mark anything complete, and it doesn't run the Chirp's Actions. Only Chirp Builder grades quizzes.

While a student has a quiz open, the quiz decides what the tutor does: give hints but never the answers (the usual setting), stay off until they submit, or answer as usual. See Build a quiz.

Suggest questions

Add an Ask the tutor block to a lesson: an optional Heading and up to 5 Suggested questions. Students tap a question to ask it.

Costs and limits

The tutor's answers use your OpenRouter key, like any chat with your Chirps: see What OpenRouter is, and who pays for what. Each student can send the tutors up to 40 messages an hour and 150 a day. Limits you set on the Chirp apply too: a daily limit per visitor counts for each student, and the Chirp's total daily limit includes tutor chats. Pausing the Chirp turns the tutor off. See Keep your AI spending in check.

If the tutor can't answer, for example because your OpenRouter credit has run out, students see "The AI tutor isn't available right now. Your lessons and progress still work."

You can't chat with the tutor in the course preview. To try it, test the Chirp in its own preview, which uses your latest saved changes even before you publish them: see Test your Chirp in the preview.