MIT × Georgia State University × Quinsigamond Community College
GenAI tutors for equitable and scalable access to personal student support
The benefits of personal tutoring are well-established, but the cost and accessibility of human tutors are out of reach for many students attending minority-serving institutions and community colleges. GenAI tutors could play a transformational role in bringing equitable, scalable, always ready-at-hand access to personal student support.
In 2023, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgia State University, and Quinsigamond Community College began a collaboration with Axim Collaborative to investigate the potential of designing a Large Language Model (LMM)-based pedagogical agent to assist students at a range of institutions, including a large public university, a community college, and an elite technical university.
The project will develop, implement, and evaluate an AI-based personal tutor that can support large numbers of learners who are working through the materials of in-person, online, or hybrid courses. This will provide initial evidence on how GenAI tutors can be designed and used to promote inclusive and equitable learning outcomes for underserved students, what factors facilitate or hinder the effective utilization of GenAI tutors, and how GenAI and human tutors can synergistically support the unique learning needs of students from diverse backgrounds in a personal and scalable manner.
The project demonstrates the importance of a co-design process that involves different institutions and their learners from the start and it will share insights and discoveries on an ongoing basis. Findings will be generalizable to other subjects and courses where appropriate training data are available and will be made freely available online to inspire development of other applications.
COLLABORATORS
Professor of Media Arts and Sciences; MIT Dean for Digital Learning; MIT
Cynthia Breazeal
Professor of Computer Science; Coordinator of Computer Science Program; QCC
Hao Loi, Ed.D
Regents’ Professor and Howard S. Starks Distinguished Chair; Director, Center for Digital Innovation; Department of Computer Information Systems; GSU
Arun Rai
Distinguished University Professor, George E. Smith Eminent Scholar’s Chair and Chair Computer Information Systems; Department of Computer Information Systems; GSU
