AI Tutor: Frequently Asked Questions by Instructors
Reference Number: AA-00825 Last Updated: 2025-11-07 10:52

AI Tutor is our generative AI chat built right into all Hawkes titles. This tool provides students with immediate help in the Practice mode of the courseware. As a personalized tutor, it is designed to go at the students’ pace, offering simple, helpful feedback in a secure environment.

1. How is AI Tutor different from other AI learning tools?  

  • AI Tutor brings Hawkes instructional content to life by leveraging the generative ability of AI. One key difference from other AI tools is that it references information only from the Hawkes library. You can be confident that your students receive relevant, consistent, and accurate answers that have been vetted by both internal and external subject matter experts. The tool has been designed with intentional guardrails in place that detect and filter out unrelated topics and attempts at cheating, keeping students focused on learning. Another major difference is that these guardrails prevent the tool from simply giving away the answer. 

2. How does AI Tutor benefit my students?  

  • AI Tutor works with the particular students who shows up, how they show up, and when they show up. AI Tutor extends learning opportunities by providing an individualized support system outside of classroom time. It helps fill in the conceptual gaps, breaks down difficult topics, and provides real-world examples to take learning further. This tool works on students' timelines and schedules to help when it's most convenient for them.  

3. Why is it important that AI Tutor only references Hawkes instructional content? 

  • AI Tutor is intentionally designed to stay within Hawkes content to provide a secure environment where you and your students can be confident that instruction offered is consistent with course materials you’ve already selected. Doing so drastically improves chances that that AI will not respond with random, inaccurate, or inappropriate feedback. 

4. What kind of teaching pedagogies is the tool designed to reflect? 

  • AI Tutor emphasizes a student-centered, supportive, and active learning approach. It prioritizes clear communication, positive reinforcement, and the cultivation of critical thinking skills. Guided by student interaction, AI tutor offers a scaffolded approach to learning by breaking down concepts step-by-step, encouraging students to build on their understanding of a single topic until they feel they’ve mastered it.  

5. Why is it beneficial to have an AI Tutor living within the Hawkes platform? 

  • In addition to referencing only Hawkes instructional content, students can experience a responsible form of AI within a controlled environment. Students can benefit from AI while simultaneously discouraging interaction with cheating tools and other generative AI systems that may not as effectively support student learning. 

6. I’m concerned about my students’ privacy and potential for data sharing.

  • No data is shared with anyone outside of the Hawkes ecosystem; everything personal will stay with us. The internal data collected will only be used to improve and further develop the tool as well as learn your students’ tendencies, allowing us to better support individual learning needs. Our AI provider will not use information sent from Hawkes to train their AI. 

7. I’ve created custom questions in my course shell that I assign my students. Is AI Tutor compatible with those? 

  • Yes, AI Tutor works with custom questions the same way it works with Hawkes-derived questions. The tool will offer students support for these questions whether you’ve added them yourself or the Hawkes customization team has shared them with you. 

8. Will AI Tutor overload my students with information?  

  • It is designed not to overload the student. AI Tutor uses a simple interface and offers limited choices, so students can focus their brainpower on the specifics of the content. It will answer one question at a time with options for students to follow up or extend the discussion as they wish. Responses from AI Tutor are generally no more than 3 sentences, offering students time to build on what they’re learning with small chunks of information. At any point, students can close out of the tool or minimize it for later use.  

9. How can students use AI Tutor to explain things in a simpler way?

  • Students can ask AI Tutor to clarify vocabulary, explain a concept from step one, and describe topics in a way that is suitable for beginners. This is one of the things the tool does best! 

10. Will AI Tutor work on all products and practice problems?  

  • AI Tutor is still learning, but it can help with most Practice questions across all products! If it comes across an image it can't understand yet, it'll ask users to describe it so it can still be of assistance.  

11. Can AI Tutor produce essays and other common assignments? 

  • While AI Tutor can generate new content within a conversation and help to explain things in new ways, it will not author papers or other larger items for students. While AI Tutor has a wealth of information, it only gives students information on the topic at hand and only a few sentences at a time.  

12. Will students’ chat history save when they move on to new questions in Practice? 

  • Chat history will be saved from one question to the next during a Practice session allowing for easy reference as students work through a lesson and revisit questions that assess similar objectives. Once a student refreshes the page or exits the lesson, the chat history will disappear. 

13. How does AI Tutor work alongside your Explain Error functionality?

  • AI Tutor and Explain Error are complementary tools designed to support students at every stage of their learning journey. Explain Error, crafted by human subject matter experts, provides tailored feedback for incorrect answers in Practice mode. AI Tutor leverages this expert knowledge to inform its conversational responses, offering students a deeper level of understanding. Additionally, AI Tutor empowers students to take the initiative by initiating new conversations at a conceptual level, whenever they feel the need—before, during, or after attempting an answer. 

14. Will AI Tutor be available in Certify?  

  • No. Just like all our learning aids, AI Tutor won’t be available in Certify, so students will still need to independently demonstrate understanding of any assigned course concept.  

15. I’m still concerned about cheating. Will AI Tutor provide answers that will encourage or allow cheating? 

  • No. If an assessment question is copied directly into the chat, AI Tutor will recognize it and prompt students to work through understanding the content instead. We understand that this is a major concern for instructors, so we’ve designed this tool to ensure it guides learning and doesn’t give answers away. Students cannot upload images to the chat. 

16. If my students speak another language, can the tool converse with them in that language?

  • AI Tutor is available in English or Spanish! Students simply type to AI Tutor in their preferred language (English or Spanish) and it will automatically respond in that language, reducing the barrier for them to engage with the content and learn more deeply.

17. Will other areas of the platform be available in Spanish?

  • Currently, only AI Tutor is available in Spanish. At Hawkes, we are dedicated to providing all students with the opportunity to learn. Right now, the platform can be translated via accessibility tools, i.e. Google Translate. We're excited to learn through AI Tutor where students find Spanish helpful so we can make targeted adjustments to our platform in the future.

18. My students sometimes make spelling and grammar mistakes when they write, and they may be more likely to type in a chat in the same way they text. I also have English Language Learners in my classes. How will AI Tutor respond to imperfections in language? 

  • AI Tutor is still learning in this area, but this tool is designed to handle simple mistakes and still understand user comments and questions. Whether English is not one’s primary language, there are accidentally mistakes made in writing, or users are typing with some shorthand, the tool should be able to converse with students. 

19. You mentioned this tool uses generative AI. What does that mean and how is it different from predictive AI?  

  • Generative AI creates brand new content while predictive AI references historical data to predict what should happen next. AI Tutor utilizes generative AI which allows the tool to meet your students exactly where they are. The tool responds to their specific questions in real time as opposed to making assumptions about what it thinks they need to know. This allows for an equitable, personalized learning experience that supports a variety of skills sets and incoming knowledge states.  

20. Will using AI Tutor slow down my students’ internet speed? 

  • No. Hawkes internal systems will handle this, and it shouldn’t have any impact on you and your students’ connectivity or internet speed. 

21. Is this going to replace the live chat?  

  • No. AI Tutor is specifically for instructional support, and it cannot help with any general technical concerns. You will still be able to get help from a real person via Customer Support whenever you need it.  

22. Are there any reporting capabilities available yet with AI Tutor? 

  • Stay tuned! We're closely monitoring how students are interacting with AI Tutor to better understand its impact on the learning experience. We'll share our insights as soon as we have a clearer picture.