The Two-Hour Setup: Getting Your Course Assistant Ready Before the Term Starts
Setting up a Course Assistant is a teaching decision before it's a technical one. You're deciding what a student gets when they're stuck, and you're not in the room: how far the Assistant goes, where it points them, and what it won't simply hand over.
That's less daunting than it sounds, because the raw material already exists. Your syllabus, readings, rubrics, and assignment directions are the bulk of what a Course Assistant needs. Setup is closer to briefing a teacher’s aide than to installing software: you hand over your course and tell it how you'd like it to help.
Your institution provisions its Nectir workspace once, alongside our team, so the technical foundation and the compliance pieces are handled before any faculty member logs in. Everything after belongs to faculty, and it's a single sitting per course. No IT ticket, no training week, no becoming a technical expert.
That division ensures Nectir can roll out across a campus and scale to its needs. The infrastructure is set up once, and each instructor’s part takes a few hours, using knowledge they already have. When the setup is that light, adoption stops being what leaders worry about. It comes down to four steps.
Create the Assistant and give it a home
You start by making the Assistant itself. From the Create menu, you choose "Create an Assistant," give it a name that reflects its purpose, and decide where it lives, either shared across your workspace or within a specific group for your course. A short user-facing description rounds it out: the note students see when they open it, where you can introduce its purpose and set a few expectations for its use.
That's the scaffolding. Everything after is about what the Assistant knows and how it behaves.
Give it your course knowledge
What sets apart a Course Assistant comes down to your institutional and course knowledge. Under the Assistant's knowledge settings, you upload the materials that define your course: your syllabus, readings, slides, rubrics, and assignment instructions. From then on, it answers from your course rather than the open web, which is the line between a grounded Course Assistant and a general consumer tool. It won't reach beyond your materials unless you deliberately enable web search for a specific purpose.
For instructors, this is the part that feels like real setup, and it's mostly a matter of adding files you already have on your desktop.
Tell it how to behave
Next, you decide how much the Assistant helps and where it guides, rather than answering outright. This lives in the Assistant's prompt, the behavior directions you write for it, and it's the most important choice you'll make, because it shapes everything a student experiences.
A useful way to approach it is to describe the tutor you'd want in your subject: one that asks a stuck student a question back, points them to the right section of the reading, and refuses to simply hand over the answer. Adam Hathaway, who teaches Computer Numerical Control machining at Chabot College, spent his tuning time exactly here, making sure the Assistant would hold that line even when students pushed.
"I had to become very surgical in how I phrased the prompt so that it wouldn't overshare information. And more importantly, couldn't be tricked by the students to give it the answer."
That guardrail is the academic-integrity control an institution can point to. The instructor sets the line a student can't talk their way past, and it holds under pressure.
Put it in front of students, then keep refining
The last step is placement. You embed the Assistant in your LMS and pin it at the top of your course, so it sits where students already work instead of behind an extra login. Access is automatic from there. Students reach it through the LMS with their regular school credentials, with no separate account to create.
Before the term starts, spend a few minutes as your own student. Ask the questions you expect in week one, watch how the Assistant responds, and adjust the tone until it sounds like the help you'd want a student to get. Adam still edits his, though the work now is refinement rather than construction, and he describes it the way a sculptor would.
"You start off with the big pieces. You knock off all of the major things that you know are not going to be in that sculpture, and now we're kind of down to the sanding."
You'll learn more about what your students actually ask in the first two weeks of the term than you could guess in August, and you can adjust as you go. The goal before the semester is a version that's genuinely useful, not a finished one.
The payoff for an afternoon
A couple of hours of setup buys back something real once the term is running: the same handful of questions you'd otherwise answer over and over, now handled the moment a student gets stuck, at any hour. You stay in control of what the Assistant knows and how it behaves, and your time goes to the students and moments where a person is genuinely needed.
For the institution, that same afternoon is what makes AI something faculty actually use, rather than another license that sits unopened. The foundation is set once, the guardrails belong to the people who teach the course, and the whole thing lives inside the systems a campus already runs on.
Frequently asked questions about Nectir AI
What is Nectir AI? Nectir AI gives colleges, universities, and high schools the ability to deploy AI Assistants across their campus that are fully controlled by faculty and administrators, built into existing learning management systems, and compliant with FERPA and SOC 2 standards. Nectir is trusted by 150,000+ students across 130+ campuses, including a partnership with California Community Colleges, which serves 2.1 million students across 116+ campuses.
Do I need to be technical to set up a Course Assistant? No. The account and workspace are set up with Nectir's team, and the part you own is more focused on organizing your course documents and deciding how you want the Assistant to help.
What materials should I give the Assistant? Whatever defines your course: syllabus, readings, slides, rubrics, and assignment instructions. Grounding it in your own materials keeps its answers tied to what you actually teach, and it won't pull from the open web unless you enable that for a specific reason.
Do students need to create an account? No. Students reach the Assistant through your LMS using their regular school login. A Nectir account is created automatically the first time they open it, with no separate password to manage.
How can I learn more about Nectir? Want to see what setting up your own Course Assistant looks like? Schedule a demo, and our team will walk you through it for a course you actually teach.