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EduAlly: A Scalable AI Powered Tutoring Practice Integrating Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Student Experiential Learning
Brockport, State University College at
Problem and need. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) rapidly advances, SUNY’s General Education Framework (2025) identifies AI in information literacy as a required core competency for all SUNY students. This mandate creates both an opportunity and an urgent need: students must learn not only how to use AI tools, but how to do so responsibly, ethically, and effectively within disciplinary contents and under faculty guidance.
To address this need, our team developed EduAlly, an AI‑assisted tutoring platform, which is grounded in the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). EduAlly provides students with immediate, personalized feedback, supports a deeper understanding of learning, and helps develop professional judgment in AI use guided by faculty.
Description of the practice. EduAlly was conceptualized by Dr. Ning Yu and Dr. Sandeep Mitra, professors of Computer Science, and Dr. Jie Zhang, a professor of Special Education, and developed by undergraduate students in Computer Science and members of the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on AI (ACM SIGAI) Student Chapter (Zhang et al., 2025). It was first piloted in one special education course in 2024-25, expanded to Biology, Computer Science, and Special Education courses in Fall 2025, and now scaled up across four SUNY campuses (i.e., Brockport, Cobleskill, Farmingdale, and Oneonta). Started with two faculty in two disciplines at SUNY Brockport, within 2 years, it has expanded to seven faculty in six disciplines across four SUNY campuses.
It offers great opportunities to connect research, teaching practices, and student experiential learning through interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty. More importantly, guided by TPACK framework, it focuses on the intentional intersections among disciplinary content, pedagogical, and technological knowledge. Accordingly, it addresses a gap in pedagogically grounded AI integration across disciplines and campuses by providing structured and formative support. It aims to improve both disciplinary content learning and digital fluency, aligning with SUNY Online’s emphasis on innovative teaching practices.
Effectiveness of EduAlly. EduAlly is an AI-powered formative assessment application that instructors can choose to use OER and integrate into their course learning management system (LMS) through a secure link strictly accessible by the instructor and students enrolled in the course to ensure security and confidentiality of the participants (Orzech et al., 2025). It enables deeper learning and stronger understanding of the content through revisions, self-assessments, and self-reflections.
Impact on student disciplinary content learning. The results of the pilot study with 74 teacher candidates in special education courses in 2024-2025 indicated that students made statistically significant improvement in their 2nd submission compared to the 1st attempt. In addition, qualitative analyses revealed that students valued AI-assisted feedback for being balanced, constructive, clear, specific, encouraging, confidence‑building, immediate, and efficient. Based on feedback from the participating students and faculty, the team has been working collectively to enhance the features offered by this AI-powered tutoring application for continued improvement (Zhang & Yu, in review).
Impact on experiential learning and career-readiness. In addition to its interdisciplinary pedagogical innovation, EduAlly is student-focused, which provides undergraduate students with a high‑impact, authentic experiential learning opportunity, where undergraduate students actively engage in the application designing, building, testing, refining, problem-solving, troubleshooting, “client” faculty interaction, project management, and team collaboration. They are also involved in research, conference presentations, and scholarly conversations. Thus, students gain hands‑on, real-world experience in AI development and deployment as well as practice professional skills so they can be prepared for career-ready competencies, which aligns with SUNY’s priority of authentic, high-impact experiential learning and career‑ready skills and competencies (Zhang & Yu, in review).
Next step. EduAlly has demonstrated positive impacts on teaching, learning, and interdisciplinary collaboration, and it is ready for continued expansion. It is replicable across disciplines and scalable across campuses. The online platform is compatible with OER and adaptable for assessments that can be individualized to fit the disciplinary needs and enhance equity and accessibility to support student learning.
Thanks to SUNY IITG funding, ongoing support from the Center of Excellence Learning and Teaching (CELT) at SUNY Brockport, and partnerships within and across participating campuses, the EduAlly project has been growing. Currently, the team is working on its system-wide scalability to serve more faculty and students.
We emphasize that by no means does EduAlly replace faculty; instead, it strengthens faculty capacity to guide students through immediate and formative feedback delivery, as well as rich learning experiences with revisions, self-assessments, and reflections. Instructors still play an essential role in monitoring and guiding students throughout the process. Our vision is a sustainable, scalable model of AI‑enhanced tutoring that supports faculty teaching, strengthens student disciplinary learning, improves digital fluency, and prepares them for academic and professional success (Zhang & Yu, in review).
Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017-1054. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9620.2006.00684.x
Orzech, M. J., Zhang, J., Orzel, V., Sultana, S., Thompsell, A., Wood, J., & Yu, N. (2025). All about OER – why, what, how, and so what: A collective case study. Journal of Educational Technology Systems, 53(3), 1-18. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/00472395241309876
State University of New York. (2025, January 8). SUNY General Education Framework. https://system.suny.edu/academic-affairs/acaproplan/general-education/suny-ge/
Zhang, J., Fonseca-Llorca, L. E., Davies, L., Mitra, S., & Yu, N. (2025). AI-powered tutoring: An interdisciplinary approach to enhancing college student learning outcomes. Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue, 27(2), 330-337. doi: https://doi.org/10.22488/okstate.25.100628
Zhang, J., & Yu, N. (In review). Preparing future educators for global challenges: AI‑powered tutoring in teacher education.
I’ve had the privilege of seeing the work Dr. Zhang and Dr. Yu have done with students over several years. Their project is different from many other OER/AI projects I’ve seen in the sense that the work is not only for students on the product end in terms of AI assisted learning, but it also empowers students to work on the creation of the product. These students also gain valuable experience in creation of AI products while working with their clients to create the desired outcomes. They also are able to keep a true student perspective active at all stages of the build. The project also recognizes the importance of faculty involvement in the learning experience even with the use of AI.
EduAlly seems to be an effective system that could potentially help students learn.
This proposal addresses a real need. The multidisciplinary aspect of the proposal is very important.
It is impressive the research that Dr. Zhang has done in this much needed area. Embracing the use of AI in a positive and constructive way.
Excellent project with much potential to improve student engagement and success across multiple disciplines.
Excellent!
This topic is highly relevant, and the execution is exceptional.
This is faculty-student collaboration at its best. An excellent design that models how AI can be used constructively by both faculty and students.
Excellent project with great potential!