Class Companion is an AI-powered tutoring and assessing tool that is designed to assist teachers in providing students with personalized education. I heard about Class Companion from a high school teacher I recently interviewed and have since tested the free version.
Class Companion is designed for K-12 students and I teach college, but from my personal experience, it is an impressive AI tutor and grading assistant.
Here’s a closer look at what Class Companion is and what it does best.
What Is Class Companion?
Class Companion uses AI to provide students with personalized feedback in a few key ways. First, it provides personalized assessments of short-answer and essay questions. Second, it has a tutor named Ditto that can help students. Finally, it can also generate rubrics and assessment questions for teachers in addition to other features.
Class Companion utilizes OpenAI’s GPT-4 model to power its answers and tutoring features. However, the interface is much more user-friendly for teaching than using GPT-4 alone would be.
Additionally, instructors have control over every aspect of the process, from the types of answers you want the AI to look for and encourage to the number of opportunities students have to retry a response.
To start, teachers load a text into Class Companion -- for instance, a short story on which they want to assess students. Then, with or without the help of AI, they can create questions related to that story, and a rubric for the AI to assess students. Teachers can also, of course, override any AI feedback with which they don't agree.
What Are Class Companion's Best Features?
Class Companion's personalized feedback is what really stands out to me. Using AI as an instructor can feel like venturing into uncharted territory, but Class Companion allows the teacher to put in many guardrails and use the tool as they see fit.
Beyond this, I love how Class Companion supports mastery education philosophies. By default, the student is given multiple chances to submit an answer and can make changes to improve in real time based on feedback AI provides.
For instance, while testing the tool, I tried a sample question provided by another instructor about The Tale of Two Cities. The question: Describe the historical context provided by Dickens in the opening chapter. How does he portray the era in which the story is set?
I remembered the opening line of this novel and asked the AI tutor if it was okay to quote that in my response; it said it was. This is a great illustration of how an AI tutor could help a student who is unsure of how to proceed. Because it’s been a while since I read this book, I couldn’t recall many details from the novel beyond that famous 'best of times, worst of times' quote. So my answer wasn't the best.
The AI response celebrated that I’d included a quote but correctly encouraged me to add more details and specifics that addressed the substance of the question. If I'd been really taking this test, I would have gone back to the source material with some specific directions in mind but without the AI having provided the answer.
Setting up my own questions based on texts I loaded into Class Companion was also easy and quicker than I anticipated—though I would want to update the prompts I provided, based on student feedback.
How Much Does Class Companion Cost?
Class Companion is free to educators and their students, but many features, including LMS integration, are only available with a school or district subscription plan.
Class Companion does not publicly state the cost of these subscriptions, but school leaders can contact Class Companion to learn more and get a quote.
Class Companion Bottom Line: Would I Use It With Students?
The short answer is yes, provided it was approved by my institution, I would use Class Companion. It seems to be a helpful AI tool that keeps the focus on the educator and student agency while harnessing AI’s power to provide personalized feedback.
The longer answer is also yes, with the caveat that, as with all AI tools, I’d like to see more randomized control trials in which groups of students take the same class with and without an AI tool such as this. I think it’s extremely unlikely that a tool such as Class Companion would hinder a student’s educational progress the way AI tutors deployed in less pedagogically sound ways have in the past, but I’d like to quantify how much it helps.
By understanding the big-picture impact of AI tools such as Class Companion, teachers and school leaders can better assess which AI tools are worth the investment.
