Introducing the Rflect Teaching Assistant - Saving Universities Hours of Preparation Time
Are you an educator in Higher Ed? How many hours do you spend per semester planning lessons, designing learning outcomes and assessing student learning, all while innovating the curriculum?
At Rflect, we’ve worked with hundreds of educators in higher education the DACH region and beyond and we know: time is a precious resource, compounded further by budgeting concerns and a mandate to innovate.
We also know from hours of conversations that most lecturers and directors of studies want to innovate, and have a mandate to do so, but they often lack the time, freedom or budget to implement meaningful, sustainable change. They want to adapt their curricula and assessments to be more ‘AI-ready’ and personalized, but lack the internal know-how. Or they want their programs to be more skills-based, supporting students with the training of skills such as self-awareness, critical thinking and co-creation, but lack a scalable and efficient system to make it work.
In the past years, we’ve been working on making Rflect the platform for universities to manage reflection and competence development, integrating it within their existing curricula and Learning Management Systems. In our fourth year, we have 0% institutional churn, but we keep seeing the same problem arise.
“I would love to build reflection into my course, but I don’t know where to start, and it will take me hours before I have something meaningful to send to students.”
This is where the meaningful use of AI comes in. Yes, we know, AI produces a lot of slop in education and raises a lot of questions, but we’ve developed something that truly helps educators create a fully tailored reflection journey for their learning program in just 30 minutes - something that would have taken hours before.
In this article, we introduce the Rflect TA - our specially trained AI assistant - based on decades of combined experience in higher education, proven pedagogies, frameworks, scientific data, best practices, and templates.
Here’s a quick demo.
What can I use the Rflect TA for?
The Rflect TA is your very own teaching assistant, and you can consult with it as such. Here are some example uses from our user base:
- Get started with or complete your reflection journey, inspired by your learning outcomes or other course information e.g. “Hey! I’d like to build a reflection journey for my bachelor students. Can you check what’s already set up and then either help me finish setting things up or show me around?”
- Get feedback on your reflection timeline e.g. “Analyze this check-in topic that I made. How could we improve it to make it more impactful?”
- Create and schedule specialized content e.g. “Please check what’s already set up and then create and schedule a topic around the theme of critical thinking.”
- Understand key insights from student shared reflections e.g. “What are students saying in their reflections? What are they enjoying or struggling with? Show me common themes and insights.” Get step by step guide to analyzing with the TA here.
- Get a report on student engagement e.g. “How did students engage with the previous week’s reflection? Are there any students disengaging or requiring support?”
- Navigate the UI e.g. “Could you show me a preview of the student view for this reflection topic?”
The Rflect TA is here to help you with these and many other use cases. It’s like having a personal learning curator in your pocket.
Fun fact: At the time of writing, the Rflect TA had already had more than 500 conversations with 150+ unique users, generating 8000 messages and 5000 tool calls.
“I appreciate the dialogue on possible reflection questions with the AI chat and think that the preparation for the individual events benefits greatly from the summarized reflections (translated from German).”
— Siegfried Walch, Head of the Department for Nonprofit, Social & Health Management, MCI Innsbruck.
Where to find it.
Already using Rflect? Look for the smiley face at the bottom-right of your lecturer dash. There are also entry points to the TA when setting up learning goals and competences in Rflect, as well as analyzing past reflection topics.
A note on AI and data safety.
The Rflect TA has been trained on our extensive Rflect library of reflection topics and best-practices, developed by humans, for humans. We always recommend keeping the human in the loop, and don’t believe AI should replace all tasks, but rather augment learning so that there’s more time and space for the “heavy lifting” of other work such as critical thinking, reflection and collaboration.
“Student reflections are some of the most personal data a university handles. We treat them that way. The Rflect TA runs entirely in the EU, never trains on student data, and our AI model provider stores no logs or data. This is the foundation we built the TA on.”
— Benjamin Nater, Lead Developer, Rflect
Our users’ data privacy is important to us and we are doing our best to ensure a safe and pleasant experience for all. User data never leaves the EU, as Rflect only uses AI models hosted in the EU. No data is stored by the model hosting provider and Rflect never uses student data to train AI models.
Our promise.
We are continuously improving the Rflect TA with user value and safety in mind. Our mission is to make inner development the new normal in education, and we feel this targeted use of AI helps achieve this mission.
Want to see the Rflect TA in action? We can help you create a personalized reflection program for your Bachelor, Master or Certificate program in minutes. Get in touch to get started info@rflect.ch.