The Course Chat answers questions and reduces your daily teaching workload while providing continuous support for your students.
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 students 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: Students can ask questions specifically about the course.
Interactive learning: Students 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. 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 the Material Strictness. This setting determines how closely the chat sticks to your uploaded documents, allowing you to adapt the system to different teaching contexts.
Normal (Default)
The chat relies predominantly on your materials but is allowed to provide minor supplementary explanations.
Recommended for most standard courses as it balances accuracy and helpfulness perfectly.
Flexible
The chat can answer freely and draw upon external subject-matter knowledge.
Ideal for seminars, open discussions, language or soft-skill courses, and courses where the uploaded materials do not cover every single topic.
Strict
The chat answers exclusively based on your provided materials. It acts more like a search engine and responds cautiously to questions outside the text (e.g., "I could not find any information on this topic in the course materials.").
Suitable for law or highly rule-based subjects.
Note: The strict mode can sometimes feel restrictive to learners if a question is not explicitly answered word-for-word in the texts.
Additional Instructions
You can further customize the tutor's behavior to match your teaching style by specifying:
The preferred language level
Tone and style
Discussion-oriented vs. solution-oriented approaches
Specific subject focuses
How to handle follow-up questions
You can read more about this in the Prompt Library.
Material Viewer
The Material Viewer is enabled by default and makes your learning materials interactively accessible.
What the Material Viewer enables
Students can open learning materials directly within OneTutor, read 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.
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.