Getting Started with OneTutor
Welcome to OneTutor! This guide will help you understand the first steps to set up and use OneTutor.
You should have already registered with OneTutor. If not, read here: How do I get access?
1. Obtaining Instructor Rights
To create courses on the OneTutor platform, you need instructor rights.
During your first login
At your first login, you will automatically be guided through the registration process.
There, select the option "Provide content" and complete the registration.
Your request will be reviewed. You will receive a notification within 24 hours once your role has been activated.
Once a plus symbol (+) is visible in your course overview and you can create a course, the activation was successful.
Request permissions later
If you already see a course overview but no plus symbol is displayed, your instructor rights are not (yet) activated.
You can apply for these at any time through the registration process, which you can find retroactively at:
open: app.onetutor.ai/welcome
2. Creating a Course
Once your instructor rights are activated, you will see a plus symbol on the course overview page. With this, you can create new courses in OneTutor.
You will be guided through the course creation process step by step. When you enter or create a course for the first time, you are also accompanied by an onboarding in 7 steps (available in German and English).
Step 1: Basic Information
Only a few pieces of information are required to create a course.
In brief, the most important are:
Course title: The name of the course
Language: Determines the language of quiz questions. This does not affect the language used by the AI tutor in chat
Academic period: Usually the management of the course periods of your institution. If you don’t see this field, it has not been set up for your institution yet. Contact us to enable it
Description: Provides context for both learners and the AI tutor. Include course content, structure, and key information. This is visible to all enrolled learners
All entered information can be adjusted later.
Step 2: Upload materials
PDF, TXT, audio and video can be uploaded. Only PDFs can be viewed by learners in the Material Viewer. Audio and video are transcribed and stored together with TXT files as background knowledge. The tutor uses this background knowledge, learners do not see it.
Typically, you upload the current script or official course documents as a PDF. Lecture recordings and textbooks work particularly well as background knowledge.
Step 3: Configure AI chat behavior
Material Adherence defines how closely the chat stays with your course materials. There are three levels:
Normal (default): The chat relies mainly on your course materials but may add light explanations. Recommended for most courses in which the core content is fully covered by the material.
Flexible: The chat may answer freely and also use general knowledge. Suitable for open discussions, language and soft-skill courses, seminars and courses whose content is not fully covered by the material.
Strict: The chat answers only on the basis of the uploaded materials. If a question goes beyond them, it responds cautiously (e.g. "I couldn't find anything about that in the course materials."). Suitable for formal subjects such as law and for courses with a strong focus on accuracy and compliance.
Note: The Strict level may be perceived as restrictive by learners if their questions are not explicitly covered in the course materials. The Normal level is recommended for most courses as it balances accuracy and helpfulness.
Tutor Behaviour: Here you define, with individual instructions (also called memories), how the AI tutor responds in your course. These can be rules such as "Always answer precisely and factually" or "Ask a clarifying question before you answer", but also facts such as the exam format. Instructions are loaded into chats automatically based on relevance and grow with the course. For now, you maintain them manually. Learn more in the Course Chat article.
Step 4: Course visibility and password protection
Define how your course can be found and who can access it.
Step 5: Invite course managers
Teaching assistants and tutors typically do not create their own courses. Instead, they are added as course managers to existing courses to supervise and maintain them.
Via "Course Managers" you can easily add your staff members to the course through email invitation. Course managers have the same rights as you and can make all settings for the course. This function is often used to delegate the maintenance of course materials and the creation of quiz questions to a responsible person.
You can adjust these settings at any time later.
3. Providing Content
After creating the course, it must be filled with content.
Upload Materials
To enable the AI tutor to answer questions in context and generate relevant quiz questions, course materials are required.
PDF, TXT, audio and video can be uploaded. Only PDFs can be viewed by learners in the Material Viewer. Audio and video are transcribed and stored together with TXT files as background knowledge. The tutor uses this background knowledge, learners do not see it.
💡 The overall course quality strongly depends on the provided materials. The best results are achieved with detailed written scripts and additional audio or video recordings.
Creating Quiz Questions
To offer learners practice opportunities, you can create quiz questions with the Quiz Builder. Open "Quizzes" in your course. There, questions are organized in quiz topics.
Create a quiz topic and click "+ Add questions".
The Quiz Builder is a chat: you describe to the Course Assistant which questions you need, and it proposes questions based on your course materials. You can also have questions generated from specific materials only.
If you already have questions, paste or attach them in the chat and import them. Incomplete or duplicate questions are skipped with a reason, and every import can be undone.
There are two question types: multiple choice and free text with AI feedback. You can add an image to both.
The difficulty levels Easy, Medium, and Hard are based on Bloom's Taxonomy, from simple fact recall to transfer questions.
💡 Courses with quiz questions have on average 50% more interactions.
After the questions are created, you must review them before they become visible to learners:
This ensures that the quality meets your expectations.
Individual components can be manually adjusted.
You can revise single questions with AI, delete them or refine them in the chat with the Course Assistant.
Afterwards, you can:
Publish: The questions are immediately available to learners.
Save for later: The questions remain saved but are not yet published.
Delete: If all of the just-generated questions are unsuitable, you can quickly delete them and generate new ones.
Not getting the type of questions you want?
Describe in the Quiz Builder chat what you need to influence the style or focus of the questions (e.g., more formal, application-oriented, shorter answers) or to adjust a single question (e.g., "four answer options for this question"). Your instructions take precedence over the default settings. You can stop a running generation at any time, questions that are already finished are kept.
4. Sharing the Course with Learners
OneTutor is provided to learners via a link. You can copy the link to your course in the course overview. You will also find the link and a QR code under "Share course". Share them, for example, via Moodle or in your first session. New learners who open the link or scan the QR code are first guided to enroll in the course, then go through the onboarding and land in the right course. Learners who cannot find their course in the catalog can request it.
If Moodle is connected to your institution via LTI, you can embed the entire OneTutor course in Moodle as a single activity. Learners can then use everything that is possible in OneTutor. You will find the guide here: Moodle integration for instructors.
In the course, learners can use four learning modes: the chat for questions, Walk me through, Quiz me and Quiz. With Walk me through, the tutor proactively guides learners through a material chapter by chapter, explains, checks understanding and goes deeper where needed. With Quiz me, it only asks questions.
5. Evaluating Usage Statistics
In the dashboard of your course, you can review the usage of the AI tutor. Here you can see how many interactions your learners had in the last seven days, how they performed on quiz questions, and what questions they ask as well as the AI tutor's responses to them.
OneTutor users are pseudonymized. Consequently, interactions cannot be traced back to individual persons. This protects learners' privacy and enables trustful interaction with the tool.
Identifying Common Topics and Learner Questions
Since especially in larger courses a vast number of questions accumulate in the chat, it becomes difficult to keep track. Therefore, you can have summaries created here on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis about the most common topics and their associated questions. In addition, the FAQ feature in the dashboard groups frequently asked questions by meaning, shows how often they occur, and provides a sample answer and how well your course material covers them.
Dashboard: Overview, Quiz Statistics and Feedback
In the additional tabs, you will find detailed usage numbers for quiz topics and feedback. The quiz statistics show submissions and success rates per topic and, for single questions, the answer options and the use of the help function in quizzes. Learners can rate both AI tutor responses and quiz questions positively or negatively. This feedback helps you recognize what works well and where there is room for improvement, so you can continuously optimize your course based on data.
6. Using OneTutor in Teaching
OneTutor can be integrated into everyday teaching in many ways.
How OneTutor is typically used is described in the articles Use Case Examples and Using OneTutor effectively in your course: a roadmap for instructors.