The Course Chat answers questions and reduces your daily teaching workload while providing continuous support for your learners.
The chat is the core feature of every course and is directly linked to your materials.
Why the Course Chat is Important for You
Saves time
Increases satisfaction
Improves learning outcomes
The tutor automatically handles:
Organizational questions (e.g., "Where can I find...?", "What is the deadline for...?")
Repetitive content-related inquiries
Personal support for learners working through the course materials
By filtering out these recurring questions, you free up valuable time to focus on core teaching.
Useful for Your Own Course Development
You can also use the chat yourself to:
Develop new examples
Create and review exam or practice questions
Reflect on and evaluate your materials
Test alternative explanations for complex topics
What the Chat Enables for Your Learners
Direct questioning: Learners can ask questions specifically about the course.
Interactive learning: Learners can work through materials dynamically.
Traceable answers: Every answer includes sources. The chat automatically opens the relevant document and points directly to the correct section.
Chat Setup
What you need to do
You simply need to integrate your course 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.
These form the knowledge base for chat answers, source citations, and the overall depth of content. Once uploaded, the Course Chat is instantly ready to use.
You determine how the chat responds
You have full control over the tutor's behavior. The most important configuration is Material Adherence. It defines how closely the chat stays with your course materials, allowing you to adapt the system to different teaching contexts. 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. It balances accuracy and helpfulness.
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."). It acts more like a search engine. Suitable for formal subjects such as law and for courses with a strong focus on accuracy and compliance.
💡 Note: The Strict level can sometimes feel restrictive to learners if a question is not explicitly answered in the materials.
Tutor Behaviour
Tutor Behaviour is a growing instruction system for your course. Here you define, with individual instructions (also called memories), how the AI tutor responds in your course, from tone and language to subject-specific corrections, additions and facts such as the exam format. Instructions are loaded into chats automatically based on relevance and grow with the course. There is no strict distinction between behavioural rules and factual content. For now, you maintain them manually.
The preferred language level
Tone and style
Discussion-oriented or solution-oriented approaches
Specific subject focuses
How to handle follow-up questions
💡 Tip: Feel free to experiment and give instructions the way you would give them to a human tutor. Just make sure they do not contradict each other.
You can read more about this in the Prompt Library.
Walk me through and Quiz me
Walk me through: The tutor proactively guides learners through a material, chapter by chapter. It explains, checks understanding along the way and goes deeper where something has not sunk in yet. With prior knowledge, it moves faster. Quiz me: The tutor only asks questions, without explaining first. The difference in one sentence: Walk me through explains and asks, Quiz me only asks.
Charts in the chat
When an answer involves numbers, the tutor can show them directly in the chat as a chart (e.g. bar, line, pie). This works in every course without any setup. Learners also see the charts when they reopen the chat later. This is especially helpful in subjects that work with data.
Stop an answer
Learners and instructors can stop a running answer of the tutor at any time instead of waiting for a long or unsuitable answer.
Material Viewer
The Material Viewer is enabled by default and makes your learning materials interactively accessible.
What the Material Viewer enables
Learners can open learning materials directly within OneTutor, read PDF documents in full, highlight specific text passages to ask targeted questions, and switch seamlessly between their questions and the source text. The chat automatically opens the correct page in the right document.
PDFs can be viewed in the Material Viewer. Audio, video and TXT files serve the tutor as background knowledge and are not shown to learners.
This transforms OneTutor from a simple Q&A tool into an active learning environment. Instead of getting stuck and skipping complex slides, learners can actively engage with the material.
Deactivating the Material Viewer
If you prefer that your learning materials are not fully viewable, you can deactivate the Material Viewer.
When deactivated:
Materials are not displayed as a browsing list.
Documents cannot be opened in their entirety.
The system will only display the specific, individual pages cited in a chat response.
This setting is ideal if materials should only be referenced as evidence but not made fully accessible for reading.