Missed a lecture? This AI agent at Bar-Ilan University helps students catch up
Bar-Ilan University introduced an AI agent on its Moodle platform to help students catch up on missed lectures by summarizing course materials and generating quizzes, with plans to expand its use.
Yarden Shay, a criminology and psychology student at Bar-Ilan University, struggled to keep up with lectures last year after missing classes, facing stress from falling behind while absorbing new material. The university’s new AI agent, powered by Azure AI Services and developed with KPMG and OpenApp, now allows students to search and summarize course materials using natural language queries, reducing the burden of catching up.
The pilot covered 71 courses and 2,400 students at Bar-Ilan University, which has over 20,000 students in Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv. Available in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, the agent operates within the university’s secure Microsoft Azure environment and will expand to 100 more courses in the 2026/27 academic year.
For Shay, the AI agent has become a study aid, helping her organize notes and test her understanding through quizzes, reducing her daily study time from five to six hours to about three. She now shares her AI-generated summaries with peers, enhancing her learning experience and fostering collaboration.
Lecturer Eliyahu Biton updated his course materials to train the AI agent, which now assists students by generating exam questions and reducing administrative queries. Students report feeling more relaxed about exams, and Biton notes a three-percentage-point average score increase among his students, though he attributes part of this to cohort quality.