Integrating A.I. in Higher Education: Protocol for a Pilot Study with 'SAMCares: An Adaptive Learning Hub'

Abstract: Learning never ends, and there is no age limit to grow yourself. However, the educational landscape may face challenges in effectively catering to students' inclusion and diverse learning needs. These students should have access to state-of-the-art methods for lecture delivery, online resources, and technology needs. However, with all the diverse learning sources, it becomes harder for students to comprehend a large amount of knowledge in a short period of time. Traditional assistive technologies and learning aids often lack the dynamic adaptability required for individualized education plans. LLMs (LLM) have been used in language translation, text summarization, and content generation applications. With rapid growth in AI over the past years, AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants have been developed. This research aims to bridge this gap by introducing an innovative study buddy we will be calling the 'SAMCares'. The system leverages a LLM (in our case, LLaMa-2 70B as the base model) and Retriever-Augmented Generation (RAG) to offer real-time, context-aware, and adaptive educational support. The context of the model will be limited to the knowledge base of Sam Houston State University (SHSU) course notes. The LLM component enables a chat-like environment to interact with it to meet the unique learning requirements of each student. For this, we will build a custom web-based GUI. At the same time, RAG enhances real-time information retrieval and text generation, in turn providing more accurate and context-specific assistance. An option to upload additional study materials in the web GUI is added in case additional knowledge support is required. The system's efficacy will be evaluated through controlled trials and iterative feedback mechanisms.