Teaching AI Literacy: Nectir at Merritt College
Most of the AI conversation in higher ed gets framed as a fight. Allow it or ban it. Trust it or police it. Put everything through an AI detector or pretend it isn't happening.
Adoria Williams, Head Librarian and Department Chair at Merritt College in Oakland, CA, looked at that same conversation and saw something familiar. She has spent years teaching students how to evaluate a source, spot a weak argument, and use information ethically. To her, AI looked like a new chapter of a job she'd been doing for a long time.
"I don't see AI as separate from information literacy. I see it as a part of the new information environment students need to learn to navigate."
That reframing changes how a school approaches AI. When AI is embedded into information literacy, it becomes something you teach rather than ban.
The responsibility to teach how to use AI
When Nectir AI first became available to Adoria through our landmark partnership with the California Community College system, she was cautious. Her students were learning the foundations of research and information literacy: how to develop a topic, search databases, evaluate sources, handle citations, and use information ethically. She wanted a tool that “supports learning and doesn’t replace it.”
Like most educators, she had her first experience with AI when students used it to cheat and “do their work for them.” Other instructors would come to her to evaluate student essays that “felt off” and had voices different from those of the students they knew. She would check the sources and find that the citations were invented by AI. If anyone on campus had a reason to ban AI outright, it was her. But she did the opposite.
Adoria described the moment she realized AI needed to become part of the system:
"I had to either get on the train, or it was gonna leave me at the station. And students were already on that train. They just weren't using it the right way."
Students weren’t waiting for permission or policies to use AI. They were pasting prompts into whatever AI tool was open in another tab, usually with no idea whether the answer they got back was accurate, invented, or somewhere in between.
Deciding to teach AI is one thing. Deciding which AI to put in front of students is another. Other AI tools students already use offer instructors no visibility, no guardrails, and no way to tie the tool to what's actually being taught in the course.
"Nectir appealed to me because it offered a more controlled environment for the use of AI."
For Adoria, control meant being able to ground the Assistant in her own course materials, set the boundaries, and know what students are actually working with.
Adoria named her Course Assistant “Bixby.” She started with her course outcomes and the exact spots where students got stuck: reading assignment directions, narrowing a topic, building keywords, searching databases, running the CRAP test for source credibility, and getting citations right. Bixby became the first stop for the questions that had once flooded her inbox.
When building Bixby, Adoria drew a hard line: it would never give an answer.
“I didn’t want students to be able to take the easy way out, and so this was the perfect tool that I could train and manipulate to actually get students to think.”
How Nectir AI works for students
Nectir AI is fully integrated into Canvas, living where students already are. “It’s right there on the left-hand side in the navigational bar, and I love that, and students love that.” Students open the course page they were already going to open, and the help is right there.
And it's there whenever they need it.
"24/7 support matters. To be able to log in to do some work at 3 AM, and your Course Assistant is right there to help you answer questions and guide you along the path to completion, I think it's key."
Many of Adoria’s students are balancing jobs, families, commuting, and full course loads. There wasn’t a realistic alternative to Bixby. Where students would previously get stuck and give up for the night, Bixby did its best work in that gap.
"I found that AI was most useful as a bridge between confusion and action with my students."
None of this replaced her. She still grades every assignment herself, gives extensive feedback, holds office hours, reaches out to students falling behind, and lets them turn in work by video or in person when that's what they need. Bixby took the repetitive questions off her plate so she could spend her time where a human actually has to be.
"It's not going to replace us. We will not let it replace us. But it can help us, and it definitely can help our students."
Knowing where humans are still required
Adoria took a leap of faith in championing Nectir AI. Her district has no district-wide AI policy yet. Faculty are still split between those who refuse AI and those who implement it with their own course rules. She was, as far as she knows, the first person in the Peralta district to teach with Nectir at all.
"The choice is not simply to ban it, or to let students use it for every single thing. The better question would be, what kind of learning do we want our students to do, and where can AI support that learning without replacing it?"
A librarian's whole discipline is knowing where human judgment is still required. That's exactly the skill students need to use AI well, and it's exactly the skill a good librarian is positioned to teach. If anything, the tool makes that expertise more necessary.
"AI is part of the information landscape now, and we have a responsibility to help students understand it, question it, and use it wisely."
Adoria got on the train because her students were already on it. The difference now is that someone is teaching them how to ride.
Frequently asked questions about Nectir AI
What is Nectir AI? Nectir AI enables colleges, universities, and high schools to deploy AI Assistants across their campuses that are fully controlled by faculty and administrators, built into existing learning management systems, and compliant with FERPA and SOC 2 Type II standards. Nectir is trusted by 150,000+ students across 130+ campuses, including a partnership with California Community Colleges, which serves 2.2 million students across 116+ campuses.
How does Nectir AI give faculty control over AI? Instructors ground each Assistant in their own course materials and set the boundaries for how they can be used. The Assistant is specific to the course, so students get help tied to what their instructor actually taught, and faculty get a way to introduce AI on their own terms rather than leaving students with tools without guardrails.
How can I learn more about Nectir? Want to see what AI support looks like when it's built into the tools your campus already uses and controlled by your faculty? Schedule a demo, and our team will walk you through how it works at schools like yours.