NMSU Tutor Bot: Harnessing AI for personalized, instant education

Traditional tutoring services were limited in availability, and students often required support outside regular academic hours. This prompted the need for AI-powered solutions that provide real-time, course-aligned guidance.

To address these challenges, NMSU partnered with Nagarro to develop an AI-powered Tutor Bot. The virtual learning companion is available 24/7. It provides real-time feedback, interactive problem-solving, and guided responses to students' course-related queries.

This initiative aligns with NMSU's goal to create a scalable, inclusive, and digitally enabled learning environment. The AI Tutor Bot serves as a foundational step toward modernizing academic support, allowing students to receive consistent, subject-specific guidance while complementing existing instructional services.

Main challenges:

• Limited availability: Traditional tutoring services followed a restricted schedule, failing to meet the immediate support needs of students, especially outside of regular teaching hours.
• Lack of real-time support: Students often faced academic roadblocks when human tutors were unavailable, leading to stalled learning and increased frustration.
• Need for course-alignment: Existing support options struggled to offer instant and tailored guidance that aligned directly with a student's current curriculum and course material.

The Tutor Bot is a web-based chatbot application built using Microsoft Azure services, including Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Search. It integrates with NMSU's Canvas Learning Management System (LMS) to ingest course materials, such as PDFs, scanned documents, PowerPoint files, Word documents, and YouTube links. These materials are processed using techniques like content chunking and metadata tagging to enable accurate, context-driven retrieval during user interactions.

The Tutor Bot leverages advanced natural language processing (NLP) to interpret student questions and deliver immediate, course-specific responses. All data is processed and stored within NMSU's infrastructure, ensuring compliance with data privacy requirements and institutional security protocols.

Solution highlights:

• A secure, standalone web application hosted on Microsoft Azure and integrated with Shibboleth IDP for faculty and student login. 
• Integration with Canvas LMS via RESTful API to retrieve Anatomy and Engineering course materials, supporting ingestion of up to 500 pages per course.
• Repository of knowledge base configuration tools to support multimedia formats (PDF, DOC, PPT, YouTube) with metadata tagging and content chunking. 
• The bot has conversational capabilities powered by Azure OpenAI, which support guided learning and real-time Q&A. 
• Student-facing features such as topic browsing, note saving, and 24/7 access to tutoring via the Tutor Bot web interface. 

New Mexico State University (NMSU) has worked with Nagarro and Microsoft to bring its AI Tutor Bot initiative into production, marking a significant milestone in the university's AI transformation journey.  

The bot was launched in production at the end of March and is actively being sampled, with user feedback from the beta phase driving continuous improvements.

By integrating the AI Tutor Bot into its academic environment, NMSU has improved access to personalized, always-available learning assistance. The multimodal interface (chat, voice, and visual support) provides flexible, student-friendly interaction. The platform enables the scalable delivery of tutoring across diverse content formats, allowing students to access course material whenever they need. The team is also building the tools and processes needed to bring similar AI solutions to other parts of the university.

Key benefits:

• 24/7 access to interactive, course-aligned tutoring outside classroom hours 
• Flexible multimodal interface, including chat, voice, and visual interaction 
• Improved academic support for high-difficulty subjects like Anatomy 
• Scalable architecture allows rapid replication across courses and subjects   
• Increased student engagement through conversational, guided learning modes
• Structured AI adoption roadmap, including testing, feedback loops, and milestone-based delivery 
• Strategic alignment with NMSU's broader vision for digital transformation and AI in education