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Personalised AI tutor to help students learn

30 Oct 2026

AITA-2 AITA-2
The AITA platform was led by Professor Xu Jianliang (left), Head and Chair Professor of the Department of Computer Science, and co-developed by Dr Zhang Ce (right), Lecturer of the Department of Computer Science, and other collaborators.

 

Gone are the days of brisk notetaking and unorganised feeding of massive course content to the brain. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in education has been reshaping the classroom, and recently an innovative AI platform developed by an HKBU-led team has shown promising results in helping students learn more effectively.

The development of AITA, a collaborative teaching materials-driven AI tutor, was led by Professor Xu Jianliang, Head and Chair Professor of the Department of Computer Science, in collaboration with Dr Zhang Ce, Lecturer of the Department of Computer Science; Dr Fu Xiaoyi, Lecturer of the Department of Journalism; and Professor Yu Chuan, Assistant Professor of the Academy of Language and Culture, as well as scholars from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

As a key initiative by HKBU to promote AI-driven educational innovation, AITA offers personalised guidance tailored to students’ learning styles, instant explanations grounded in course materials, and learning analytics designed to enhance student engagement.

A personalised and course-based AI tutor

“Most general-purpose AI tools on the market are not specifically designed for educational settings, leading to issues such as a lack of understanding of course content and impersonalised feedback,” says Dr Zhang. To meet the learning needs of students, AITA can seamlessly integrate with HKBU’s e-learning platform, Moodle, and generate key summaries and mind maps of the course content with a single click. It can also automatically align lecture audio with slides, and students can jump to any slide and listen to the corresponding explanation, making the study process more precise and time efficient.

According to Dr Zhang, students can highlight any text on the lecture slides uploaded to the platform and ask questions in various spoken languages. The platform will then provide a step-by-step answer with the exact slide reference. “AITA is powered by a course-oriented Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which ensures the large language model generates content from uploaded course materials and reduces the chance of hallucinations.”

He highlights another innovative feature of the platform, the “AI Teaching and Instruction Agent”, which can accurately interpret students’ questions, guide active learning and create assessment questions. “RAG provides knowledge based on the course, while the AI Teaching and Instruction Agent determines how to make use of that knowledge,” he says.

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(Back row, from left) Students Zhang Yanxiao and Billy Shen share how the AITA platform has supported their studies.
AITA, a collaborative teaching materials-driven AI tutor developed by an HKBU-led team, has shown promising results in helping students learn more effectively.
The AITA project team was named the First Runner-Up in the stream “Development of Tailored AI Agents” at the 2nd International Competition on AI in Education 2026.

Empowering students to learn more effectively

For assessment, AITA generates quizzes with automated grading and feedback, while a learning analytics engine tracks student engagement in real time and provides recommendations for instructors to adjust their teaching.

Zhang Yanxiao, a fourth-year Computer Science student, has used the platform to revise for exams. “AITA enables me to visualise the content of each slide and provides specific answers to my questions. Its mind map feature is particularly useful in helping me understand the connections between different concepts. It can also generate quizzes based on the course materials, which in turn allows me to better prepare for my exams,” Yanxiao says.

Billy Shen, a Master of Science in Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence student, says the platform has supported his studies. He suggests that the platform can have a built-in screenshot feature to make it easier for users to directly circle the content they have queries about.

Award-winning platform for use in multi-universities

AITA is already adopted by more than 100 courses, with more than 3,000 registered users from HKBU and CUHK, and over 20 institutions in the Chinese Mainland and overseas. This innovative platform has been awarded First Runner-Up at the 2nd International Competition on AI in Education 2026 hosted by the Artificial Intelligence Research and Education Alliance of The Education University of Hong Kong. It was also shortlisted as a finalist in the QS Reimagine Education Awards 2026.

Supported by the Fund for Innovative Technology-in-Education under the University Grants Committee, Professor Xu and his team will expand the application of AITA towards multi-university deployment.

Professor Xu hopes that more faculty members will adopt the platform and provide feedback on its features. “The teaching needs of different disciplines may not be the same. We hope more instructors from different fields will work with us to improve the relevant features on the platform so we can further promote the widespread adoption of AITA,” he says.