When Yarden Shay missed some classes in her first semester at Bar-Ilan University (BIU) last year, she struggled to get up to speed. The lectures were on legal responsibility, just one of 22 modules in the first year of her undergraduate degree in criminology and psychology.

Plugging that knowledge gap with borrowed notes while staying on top of six to eight hours of fresh lectures daily was an ordeal, she recalls.

“It’s like a gap that is growing through time,” says Shay.

“So, you’re already falling behind, and you’re getting new information that isn’t connecting, because you don’t have the previous information. The stress is everywhere.” That stress is less an issue for her today.

Yarden Shay, an undergraduate at Bar-Ilan University (BIU) who is studying for a degree in criminology and psychology. Photo by Yarden Lev for Microsoft.

In February, BIU piloted an AI agent on its Moodle learning platform that helps students search and summarize course materials using natural language queries, turning these vast resources into learning support. Powered by Azure AI Services and developed by KPMG and OpenApp using Microsoft Copilot Studio, the agent is grounded exclusively in course materials uploaded by BIU’s teaching staff, including recorded lectures, transcripts, presentations and articles. Students can ask the agent to zero in on a topic mentioned in a lecture, create summaries and even test them using the quiz feature.

The pilot covered 71 courses and about 2,400 students at BIU, one of Israel’s leading public research universities with over 20,000 students in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv. Available in Hebrew, Arabic and English, the agent will be rolled out to another 100 courses in the first semester of the 2026/27 academic year, which began in October.

The agent operates in the university’s secure Microsoft Azure environment.

Using AI for active study

For Shay, having all that information organized and uploaded in one place means she no longer spends hours tracking down her course mates for missing notes. But the AI agent — represented by a blue robotic owl — is not just a means of catching up. She now uses it as a study aid.

“The AI tool takes notes of everything, including the lectures. And I prefer reading the notes because I can’t ask questions during the lecture, and this way I feel like my brain is working,” she says. “I need active study, and that’s what the AI tool is doing. Because it gives you everything you need to know and a way of testing yourself about what you’ve learned.”

Photo by Ron Rahamim for Microsoft.

Shay gets the learning agent to test her, using both the multiple-choice format as well as open-ended questions. It tells her when she’s got an answer right or wrong and why. She now spends about three hours a day studying after lectures, compared with five to six hours previously.

Having the AI tool as her study companion, she says, has made her feel more self-reliant and improved her student experience. And she can now share her own notes, created with the AI agent’s help.

“A few students asked me for my summaries, and it felt so good that they had helped me, and I can now help them,” she says.

AI as teacher’s assistant, not replacement

Eliyahu Biton, a practicing lawyer and lecturer at BIU since 2017, helped test the AI agent before it went live. His priority, he says, was getting the agent to perform well enough to be his teaching assistant. This meant overhauling and updating materials for the online healthcare law and ethics courses he runs for medical imaging students every year.

Eliyahu Biton, a lecturer at BIU, left, and student Yarden Shay. Photo by Ron Rahamim for Microsoft.

“If you want the bot to be grounded in the material, you need to explain it because you want it to teach what you want to teach,” he says. “So, I needed to rephrase the course materials and get detailed papers for it. If I want it to be my assistant, I need to teach it. So, I teach the bot what to learn, what to answer the students.”

Oversight of the course materials is essential to ensure they can be relied on by the students as learning aids. This included feeding the AI agent transcripts of all his video lectures and expanding the bullet points on his slides with research papers and recommended reading. Then he painstakingly tested the agent’s responses until he was satisfied with their accuracy.

So far, he has observed positive changes in his students since the AI learning tool was introduced. He says he fields fewer routine and administrative questions, and students are less nervous about examinations.

“They are more relaxed about exams now,” he says. “Before, I would just upload old exam questions for them to revise. Now I ask them to ask the bot to generate an exam for them. So, they come to the exam more relaxed because they can generate more questions and do their own exams.”

At the finals in August, the average score among his 50 or so students was three percentage points higher than in previous years — an outcome he concedes could also be due to a better-than-average cohort.

As part of the course, Biton continues to hold 90-minute sessions with his students four to six times a year, where he picks a topic from the course for a deeper discussion. He notes, however, that his role is transforming from pure teaching to mentoring now that the learning agent makes it easier to find course information.

“Knowledge is no longer the problem,” he says, referring to how quickly AI can retrieve that information. “But what I can do better than a chatbot is to mentor, to guide the student on how to learn and how to approach challenges in the real world.”

For Shay, the AI agent is an add-on, not a replacement for her teachers.

“It’s something that you build on, and then you get a better understanding of the course,” she says. “So it’s something that goes with the lecturer, not instead of the lecturer.”

Top Image: BIU is one of Israel’s leading public research universities. It introduced the learning agent in 71 courses and plans to expand it to another 100 courses. Photo by Ron Rahamim for Microsoft.

Lim Ai Leen reports on AI for Microsoft Source, focusing on how it’s improving lives in Asia. Ai Leen was formerly associate foreign editor at The Straits Times in Singapore and still pens an occasional weekend column. Contact her on LinkedIn.