MyCourses AI Assistant
Customised AI Tutoring to Your MyCourses Workspace: the MyCourses AI Assistant plugin provides a secure environment for students to interact with AI, grounded directly on your uploaded course materials.
Why Use the MyCourses AI Assistant?
Design AI-powered learning activities and customised AI-tasks for your students:
- Secure Document Processing: Upload your own course materials and documents as source materials for the AI to prioritise in a given task.
- Tailored Teaching Styles: You control the AI's functioning. Create an instructional prompt to guide the AI chat's interactions and decide whether it gives direct answers, acts as a Socratic tutor, strictly references uploaded documents, or engages students through complex and customised learning scenarios.
- A Safe Sandbox for Students: Similarly to the Aalto AI Assistant, the MyCourses AI Assistant uses a safe connection to LLMs that does not save the discussions and does not use the discussions to train the LLM (currently GPT-5). All interactions happen securely within the MyCourses ecosystem.
- Seamless AI Access: The chat window embeds directly into your MyCourses work area as an activity page and acts as an interactive, 24/7 study aid strictly guided by the documents you upload and the rules you set.
Customise Your Assistant
Control How the AI Interacts. To ensure the AI aligns with the learning goals for the task, the plugin requires a "system prompt". This is a set of background instructions that guide the AI how to behave and how to process the uploaded source materials for the task.
For more specific discipline-bound AI learning activities and instructional prompting, please feel free to send a request to: myteachingsupport@aalto.fi.
How to Enable the Plugin in MyCourses (Step-by-Step)
- Navigate to your specific workspace in MyCourses.
- Turn Editing On (top right corner).
- Add an Activity or Resource in your desired course section.
- Select "MyCourses AI Assistant" from the plugin list.
- Configure: Follow the "Guided setup" or "Manual setup" and upload your course documents. Select, write or copy-paste your chosen instructional prompt (system prompt) into the tab "AI Behavior". Add a heading and support tips for students to keep in mind and steps to follow when interacting with the chat. Add e.g. activity steps or goals as chat support tips for the students.
- Save changes: The AI is now ready for testing and use. It is a good practice to fully test the chat before publishing the activity to your students. You can test the chat by hiding the activity on the MyCourses page and iteratively testing and editing your system prompt to refine the AI's answers in the custom system prompt option.
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Remember to add the full learning task guidelines for students on a page in MyCourses. These are recommended to include the learning goals and a few critical AI-reflection questions relating to the activity.