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A UCLA comparative literature class will be taught with an AI-powered textbook in 2025. This is the first time the college will use the system for a humanities course, although it was already implemented in an introductory history course at the university in the most recent semester.
UCLA has announced an upcoming AI textbook in a blog post. Professor Zrinka Stahulyak teaches “History and fiction. the study of literature from the Middle Ages to the 17th century” class and is enthusiastic about using AI-generated course materials. “It allows us to spend more time teaching basic analytical skills, critical thinking and reading skills in a consistent way; the things professors do best.” he said UCLA. “Those are hard things to do when you have 300 students in a class, but it allows us to do them a lot better.”
The textbook is the company that created it called Kudu. How often am I angry about it? Dissemination of generative AI it’s hard for me to be mad at Kudu in our lives.College textbooks and the economy around them have been around for a long time nightmare. For decades, printing presses churned out enormous textbooks costing hundreds of dollars.
They would disrupt the used market by making small changes to a few pages, reprinting everything, and then charging students for a new edition.Worse still, distributing expensive “access codes”. A student who saved cash by buying an outdated textbook will be reimbursed one-time use codesometimes as much as $100 to access online course materials.
Kudu charges students $25 per semester to use the textbook.It’s all available online, so there’s no bulky book to lug around campus.
According to Kudu and the ACLU, the course was created in collaboration with the professor. This is a more complex process than just feeding everything into the LLM. The textbooks are prepared for each class and take more than four months.” To create the new textbook, Stahuliak provided Kudu with course notes from previous iterations of the class, as well as PowerPoint presentations and YouTube videos he made: COVID-19 for distance learning during a pandemic,” UCLA said.
What ends up on the other end is an interactive system. When something is created, Kudu pays a professor to fact-check and critique the work. “The content for the comparative literature course was vetted by Jacob Johnson, a history major. who graduated in 2024,” UCLA said.
There are lots of written bits as well as videos and course assignments. A demonstration video on Kudu’s website shows the vlogging brothers, Hank and John Green, discussing nuclear science and Roman History The system also comes with a built-in chatbot, of course, that students can talk to if they have questions.
The LLM is only taught on the material and doesn’t have any access beyond that. “It will only respond based on the course content,” Stahuliak told UCLA risk to create their homework.” Kudu also claimed to have a system to detect when a student is providing answers using AI systems.
Stahuliak said Kudu will save her and her teaching assistants time and allow them to focus on their students instead of the course created in the textbook, and I can actually work with students to read primary sources and introduce them to what it means to analyze and think critically.” he said.
