LMU has introduced a course-specific AI program that answers students’ questions using material provided by instructors, which can include recordings of class sessions.
The AI Study Companion launched in fall 2025 with 125 students and was developed in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to a post on LMU Newsroom citing an AWS blog.
The pilot program was developed in-house “out of a desire to give faculty and students a secure way to explore AI that is more closely aligned with course learning objectives than general-purpose AI tools,” said Matt Frank, Director of Teaching, Learning, and Research Technology, in a statement provided to The Lion on behalf of LMU’s Information Technology Services (ITS) department.
At the time of its initial rollout, eight classes were using the tool. This semester, that number rose to 22 classes across campus, according to Frank.
Classrooms have long had audio and video recording technology, but newer installations—including two more installed this past summer—may include upgraded cameras and ceiling microphones, Frank clarified in a follow-up statement to The Lion.
“The purpose of these upgrades is not tied to any single initiative, such as AI or classroom recording,” said Frank. The equipment supports a range of uses beyond the AI Study Companion, including lecture capture, remote guest speakers, hybrid courses, accessibility accommodations.
Fernando Guerra, Professor of Political Science and Chicano/a Studies, was approached by ITS to be part of the first cohort of classes for the pilot program last year.
Guerra explained that his recorded class sessions are uploaded into the closed AI system. Students are then able to access the AI and prompt it to recall and summarize anything said during a given class session.
In addition to class recordings, instructors can upload readings, notes, and other documents into the AI Study Companion so students can directly engage with the course material.
“It only uses the information you feed it,” Guerra said. “It is sort of like a super integrated Brightspace.”
Guerra, a longtime LMU professor, said the program has proven to be beneficial for both him and his students. “I have found it very helpful in organizing,” he said. “I don’t have quantifiable data for this, but my sense is that the students ended up reading even more.”
However, Guerra said the tool has its limits. “It’s not a large language model,” he said. “It’s a limited language model—very limited, right? So it tended to hallucinate a little bit more than what you get from Claude or ChatGPT, etcetera.”
Rylee Goldfarb, a Senior double majoring in Environmental Studies and Political Science, said she has taken three classes using the AI Study Companion, where class sessions were recorded by newly installed equipment. “They showed us what the camera looks like and what the videos and audio are, so we had a better understanding,” she said. “And then that’s when we realized, ‘oh sh–t, they’re recording everywhere, and they can get every angle.’”
Goldfarb said most of her classmates treat the AI Study Companion as an afterthought. “No one in my class or any of the classes I’ve had ever use it or use it as a reliable source,” she said. “It’s usually as a last ditch effort if someone missed class and they weren’t able to reach a professor, classmate, or TA.”
Part of the reason, Goldfarb said, is that they don’t trust it. “We’ve tested it out. There’s plenty of times where it fabricates things or misrepresents someone.”
One student mentioned the lingering awareness of being recorded in the classroom and having her unfiltered opinions at risk of being put online.
“Subconsciously, we all knew that we were being recorded. So whenever something provocative came up, someone would always point out, like ‘Oh, you’re being recorded’… So you never really forget it’s there,” said Jocelyn Morales, a Senior Political Science and Urban Studies double major, and among the first students to agree to participate in the AI Study Companion program.
“[In class], you’re expressing your opinions and everything like that, and you’re just hoping that this isn’t gonna make its way to the internet, but you really don’t know,” Morales said. “There’s the possibility of your opinions being put out there, even if you want it to be in a safe space—like a classroom should be.”
Guerra said the system is designed not to identify individual students. “The discussions are de-identified,” he said. “It only has ‘a student said this.’”
But that anonymity depends on names never being said aloud in class, according to Senior Political Science major Gavin Cuomo. He said the AI defaults to labels like “Speaker One” only “unless someone mentions a name in class.”
Cuomo has taken two classes using the AI Study Companion, and says his experience with the tool has mainly been positive. “I think it’s a really great tool as long as you keep the anonymity,” he said. “I don’t want my name being out there for stuff that I don’t know where it’s going. I don’t know what LMU really does with the transcripts, but I think it’s honestly a really great idea as a study tool.”
Goldfarb said that last semester, her class began asking the AI questions about specific classmates for fun. “It would respond with things about their personality or things that are more personal in a sense,” she said, “because anytime there were jokes made, or a person’s name was used in context for something, they would then pull it. It would identify them.” She said the AI even correctly identified where a classmate was from.
Frank claimed audio and visual recording data is removed from the tool at the end of each semester and stored under LMU’s existing data policies, while faculty may retain access in other places like Box and Brightspace. Those policies do not specifically mention classroom recording data, and none have been updated since the AI Study Companion’s initial 2025 rollout.
“They have told us that after each class is done, the semester’s over, they delete [the data]. It’s wiped from the system,” Goldfarb said. At the beginning of each semester that she’s taken a class incorporating the program, she explained that students are informed about the AI Study Companion, noting that efforts by LMU to foster discussion about the program in class have faded over time.
“Each semester we’ve had less and less time to even discuss it,” she said. Goldfarb recalled signing a form during her first semester using the tool, and said that in later semesters, agreement shifted to a click-through prompt. “We had to click a button on a computer that said ‘I agree,’ and if you didn’t agree, you would be dropped from the class.”
Frank said the form Goldfarb described was likely a separate, optional research study, unrelated to program participation, and said students have always been required to accept an end-user license agreement when first logging in to the AI system.
Regarding the future of the AI Study Companion program, Frank stated that “The goal is to learn from this experience and, through continued discernment with university leadership, faculty, and students, determine how AI tools can best support teaching and learning.”
