Classroom-Focused AI Chatbot Is Making Its Way Into UCI Classrooms
January 28, 2025
By: Johnny Nguyen
After launching ZotGPT, one of the nation's first university-developed AI chatbots to students in April 2024, UC Irvine is furthering its mission of enhancing the world-class education that has made it a Top 10 Public University (Forbes) by embracing new and exciting possibilities of generative technologies.
UCI is now introducing ClassChat: a ZotGPT tool with the ability to create course-specific enclaves and learning environments that have significant potential to enhance student learning and success. Joining our ZotGPT suite of AI services, ClassChat represents UCI's next bold step into the higher education AI space.
Developed by UCI's Office of Information Technology (OIT) and designed as a classroom assistant, ClassChat allows instructors to build unique course-relevant instances of ZotGPT Chat where they can upload class materials, literature and assignments for the large-language model to reference in its answers to students. By closing off the chatbot's access to unrelated knowledge and making student AI interactions more relevant and purposeful to their coursework, ClassChat opens the doors for instructors to introduce guarded, responsible AI usage in their teaching to maximize student learning and engagement. In addition to uploading course materials and creating course-specific spaces, ZotGPT and OIT AI Lead Software Solutions Architect and Developer Chris Price states that current features provided are not yet seen in other higher education AI tools. Additional planned features also include Canvas integration, giving the ability for instructors and students to organize modules based on knowledge.
"We want to raise AI usage to a level of explicitness [in the classroom], rather than a background use-scenario that is either approved or unapproved," says Tyrus Miller, Dean of the School of Humanities and Professor of English and Art History at UCI, on the driving force behind the development of ClassChat.
Dean Miller was influential in shaping the development of ClassChat, and in fall 2024 pilot-tested the program in his course titled Visual Studies 295, Modernism & Avant Garde," a graduate-level art history seminar marked by advanced discussion and rigorous coursework. Speaking about his ClassChat pilot, Dean Miller emphasized the practical benefits he had envisioned from the service, citing that the curated textual corpus would potentially allow students to access relevant information and connections across advanced, graduate-level texts with greater levels of accuracy and course relevance than had they used general-information AI chatbots. While the tool demonstrated some success in certain tasks, in general his class concluded that it needs further development and fine-tuning to be appropriate for graduate-level management of information, particularly in a discipline like art history where both texts and images are involved. In the coming months, as the tool is rolled out to a variety of disciplines and levels of rigor, it is expected that the specificity and variability of its use cases will continue to be honed and enhanced.
ClassChat's proponents, including Price and Dean Miller, recognize that the service's strengths lie in its mission of introducing intentionality, collaboration, transparency and specificity to educational AI usage. In stark contrast to the gray area that much of student-AI interactions existed in before, Price states that ClassChat was always envisioned as a mutual collaboration tool between instructors and students, where more power is put into instructors' hands while also providing students with a more satisfying and effective academic use-case when working with AI.
UCI's Vice Chancellor of Information, Technology and Data & Chief Digital Officer Tom Andriola, a sponsor of this project, agrees.
He said: "AI is here and being used by students worldwide whether we like it or not. Encouraging students and educators to collaborate on the creation of useful tools that enhance student learning and provide opportunities for AI literacy and use will serve our students well as they continue on beyond college into real jobs and industries that are already utilizing AI tools every day."
Empowering students with this tool, Dean Miller believes, also discourages improper AI usage. He says, "With ClassChat, we're creating an environment of trust where there is not much of an incentive to violate academic integrity.
OIT's AI team was grateful to get direction first-hand from the campus community they are trying to support, and are prioritizing what matters most to that community. Some pilot testers expressed their wish for more refinement and control over ClassChat's learning features. In response, the development team is currently working to add experimental approaches of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities to ZotGPT and ClassChat, which would allow UC Irvine's AI platform to deliver more context-aware, precise and relevant answers.
Students may begin to see ClassChat making its way into their classrooms starting in the Winter 2025 quarter. Instructors looking to bring ClassChat to their classrooms can reach out to oit-ai@uci.edu.