Instructor Website Guide

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Instructor Guide · 1
S C I E N T I F I C I N Q U I R Y W I T H A I
Instructor Guide
Everything a teacher can see and do on the Sci-AI platform
For faculty / teacher accounts
knowledgewithai.com · UC Merced · August 2026
1. Before you start
1.1 What this platform is
Sci-AI (knowledgewithai.com) distributes course materials and runs retrieval practice for STEM topics.
Students work through lab modules, prelab, simulation, self-check, and retrieval practice. The site records
what they did. As a teacher your job on the platform is to run classes, release labs to them, and read the
dashboards that tell you who is keeping up.
1.2 Your account
Your account has the faculty role, shown throughout the interface as Teacher. That gives you every teaching
tool and every class dashboard, but not the platform-building tools. The table below is the honest boundary;
section 6 has the full comparison.
You can You cannot, ask an admin
Create and manage your own classes Create, edit, or delete any account
Enroll and remove students Reset anyone's password
Assign, reorder, and pause labs per class Create or edit lab modules
See all files and retrieval practice questions Write, upload, delete, or edit files and questions
Read every class dashboard and student history Upload simulations
Download instructor guides, lesson plans, and
answer keys
Import a question bank from JSON

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You can You cannot, ask an admin
Archive your own classes Transfer class ownership
1.3 Signing in and out
1. Go to knowledgewithai.com and click Sign in.
2. Enter your username (always lowercase) and password. Continue with Google works too if your
account is tied to a Google address.
3. You land on the portal home.
Sign out sits at the bottom of the left sidebar, under your name and role. It ends the session on that device
only.
Forgot your password? The Forgot your password link only works for accounts that carry an email
address. A faculty account an admin created by hand has none, so yours almost certainly needs an admin
to reset it — see section 6.
2. Getting around
2.1 The sidebar
The left sidebar is the same on every page. As a teacher it holds Home, a General Documents link, and four
groups:
• Home — your landing page.
• General Documents — course-wide files that belong to no single lab: the syllabus, the lab schedule, and
anything else an admin publishes there. Read-only for you, and faculty-access files show here as well as
public ones.
• Classes — the classes you own, if any. Clicking one scopes the Labs group below to that class's assigned
labs.
• Labs — every published lab module, numbered. Click the word Labs to collapse or expand the group.
• Practice — Retrieval Tool (your practice preview).
• Teaching — Progress, Lab completion, Post-class engagement, Classes, Files, Retrieval Tool Questions.
Below the groups: a Help link, your name and role, Sign out, and small links to Connections & data and
Privacy.

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2.2 Built-in Help
The Help link opens a searchable list of step-by-step guides written for your role, grouped into Classes,
Monitoring, Content, and Account & data. Each guide expands into numbered steps, and Show me walks you
through them on the real page.
Figure 1 — The Help page. Category chips filter the guide list.
3. Running your classes
3.1 Create a class
1. Sidebar → Classes (Teaching group).
2. Click New class.
3. Type the class name, for example *PHYS 21 — Spring 2026*.
4. Tick the labs this class starts with. Students see only the labs assigned here, in this order. You can
change both later.
5. Click Create class. You land on the class management page.
3.2 Add students
1. Sidebar → Classes, then open the class.
2. Scroll to the Roster card.
3. Type the student's username or email address and click Add.
The account has to exist first Enrolment does not create accounts, and you cannot create them. Only
student accounts can be enrolled. A student who signs up with their @ucmerced.edu email, or with their

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campus Google account, lands as a student and is enrollable straight away — so the usual fix is to send
them to knowledgewithai.com to sign up. Anyone who signed up another way is a guest and needs an
admin to promote them; anyone with no account at all needs an admin to create one.
3.3 Assign more labs
Open the class, find the Add labs card, tick the labs you want, and click Add selected. Students see them
immediately.
3.4 Pause or reorder a lab
On the class page, the Assigned labs card lists each lab with a drag handle, a padlock toggle, and Remove.
• Drag a row by its handle to reorder. This is the order that class's students see in their sidebar.
• Click the padlock to lock a lab. A locked lab stays visible to students with a padlock icon but will not
open, use it to hold a lab back until you are ready.
• Remove takes the lab off this class's list.
Scope Locking and reordering affect the class you are doing the action in only. Other classes assigned the
same lab are untouched.
3.5 Archive a class
At the bottom of the class page, the Lifecycle card has Archive class. Archiving hides the class from active lists
and from students' sidebars. No data is lost, you can unarchive or hard-delete it later from the Archived view,
reached from the Archived button on the Classes hub.
3.6 Find an archived class
Sidebar → Classes → Archived. Archived classes drop off the main list but stay open to read.
3.7 Reset a class's progress
This is global, not per-class The Danger zone at the bottom of the class page deletes every enrolled
student's learning history: spaced-repetition scheduling, attempts, reviews, sessions, lab and simulation
completions, downloads, mastery, their place on every archived weekly leaderboard, and everything the
AI tutor recorded about them (mind map, personalization, learning style, struggles, and per-lab prelab
progress), including their progress in classes other than yours. Student accounts survive so they can still
sign in. It cannot be undone. If you are not certain, talk to an admin first.
To run it you must type the class name exactly into the confirmation box, then click Reset progress for
everyone in this class.
Changing owners Transferring a class to a different teacher is an admin action. If you are handing a class
over, ask an admin to do it. The transfer does not touch student history.

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4. Monitoring your students
Four dashboards answer four different questions. All of them scope to the classes you can see, with a tab per
class and an All classes tab.
4.1 The Progress hub
Sidebar → Progress. Two doors: Open retrieval progress for what students recall in practice, and Open
prelab progress for what the AI tutor recorded during their prelabs. Below them, Overall mastery by lesson
scores each lesson at prelab 30% / retrieval 70%, with a bar per lesson and a line reading "among the N who
started · X% across all N · N not started".
4.2 How is my class doing? — Retrieval progress
1. Sidebar → Progress → Open retrieval progress.
2. Pick a class tab, or stay on All classes.
Card What it shows
Mastery by lab Class-average mastery per lab, 0–100. The quickest read on which lab the class is
weakest on.
Flagged students Rule-based flags across all modules: a name, the signal, and a one-line reason.
Class leaderboards This week, resets every Monday. Points only count practice on that class's own
labs, so two classes are not directly comparable.
Students Sorted needs-attention-first. Search by name or username. Each row shows
sessions, answers, percent correct, percent guessed, and last activity, with View
progress → for the answer-by-answer history.
Figure 2 — Retrieval progress. Class tabs across the top, mastery tiles, then flagged students.

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Read the reason line Early in a term most flags are simply "hasn't started retrieval practice on the
assigned labs". That is not the same as struggling. The detail line under each name tells you which it is.
4.3 Which questions are they getting wrong?
From Retrieval progress, click View missed questions →. The page ranks the five lessons affecting the most
students by incorrect rate, with the number of students and attempts behind each, and lets you pick a lesson
to inspect every strictly incorrect answer students actually gave.
4.4 Who has finished each lab? Lab completion page
Sidebar → Lab completion. Pick a class tab and a lab from the dropdown. The table lists every student against
Prelab, Simulation, Postlab, and a Done count.
Figure 3 — Lab completion for one lab.
The columns complete on different triggers:
• Prelab — when the AI tutor syncs the prelab back to the site or a student manually inputs a JSON file
(fallback).
• Simulation — after that simulation's own worked-time threshold, which an admin sets per simulation
when uploading it (10 minutes unless they changed it).
• Postlab — 30 minutes of retrieval practice and simulation work combined. The same simulation minutes
count toward both.
• Time is counted only while a student is actually interacting (2 minute timeout for inactivity).
4.5 Post-class engagement minutes
Sidebar → Post-class engagement. A grid of every student against every lab, showing minutes banked out of
30 and a Labs done total.

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Figure 4 — Post-class engagement across all your classes.
• A page left open earns nothing. The clock only runs while the student is interacting.
• A lab's clock starts when the student opens its Postlab card.
• “·” means they never opened it. “—" means they started and have banked under a minute.
• Click a student's name for the retrieval-versus-simulation split per lab.
4.6 One student's prelab history
Sidebar → Progress → Open prelab progress. Search by username or display name, then View progress →
for what the AI tutor recorded lab by lab: topic mastery, mind map, personalization, learning style, and
struggles. The Missed topics card at the top aggregates missed topics per lesson and surfaces any topic
shared by at least two students.
4.7 Last week's frozen results
From Retrieval progress, the weekly results card links to Every recorded week. It shows the board as it stood
when the week closed, so it stops moving under you. The card is scoped to the selected class tab and only
appears once a week has actually closed.
4.8 How scoring works
Under the leaderboard, How Scoring Works explains what earns points, what does not, and why two classes
are not directly comparable.
4.9 Run a competition between classes
1. Sidebar → Progress → Open retrieval progress → the Competition tab.
2. Name the competition and tick two or more classes.
3. Click Create competition.

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A class scores the average points per enrolled student, so a smaller class is not at a disadvantage, but
students who do not practice still count toward the average. Existing competitions can be renamed, have
classes added or removed, or be deleted.
5. Content: questions, files, and labs
5.1 Find and download course files
Sidebar → Files. You get two tabs, Public and Private, each with a count, and file-type sub-tabs inside them:
Documents, Images, Videos, Slides, Audio. Each row shows the title, an access badge, the description, and
filename · size · category, with a View button that opens the file.
Read-only for teachers You can browse and download everything, including private faculty material, but
changes go through an admin.
5.2 Lab pages and instructor-only material
Clicking a lab in the sidebar opens its landing page: a grid of numbered section cards. Students see most of
them. Three are yours alone:
Card Tag What it is
Instructor guide INSTRUCTOR The teaching notes for running the lab.
Lesson plan LESSON PLAN The session plan.
Self check answer key ANSWER KEY Answers to the lab's self-check.
These cards never render for a student, and the files behind them are private. The download route rejects
non-staff requests on the file itself, not just the page.
Figure 6 — A lab landing page as staff see it. The last three cards are instructor-only.

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The other cards a lab may carry: Prelab (read first), Self check, Simulation, Retrieval, Postlab, Analysis guide,
Student guide, Activity, Video tutorial, Research paper, AI grading prompt (download-only, students feed it
to their own chatbot), and Supplemental Files (optional resources, not tracked for completion).
Who builds labs Creating lab modules and attaching their documents is admin-only. If a lab is missing a
document, or the card order looks wrong, that is an admin fix.
5.3 Try practice the way students see it
Sidebar → Retrieval Tool → Start practice →. Useful for checking a question reads properly before students
hit it. Practice specific topics → Choose topics narrows it to particular labs that you can select.
It does not count Staff sessions run against the unlocked banks students can see and are never recorded
as class activity.
5.4 Read the retrieval practice questions
Sidebar → Retrieval Tool Questions. You get a read-only list of every bank and the questions inside it —
prompt, format, difficulty, role, and expected answer — which is the quickest way to check what a lab
actually asks before you teach it, or to quote a question back to an admin who needs to fix it.
Read-only for teachers There is no New Question tab and no per-row edit on a faculty account: writing,
editing, deleting, and bulk-importing questions are all admin jobs. You see the same questions an admin
does.
5.5 Connections & data
The Connections & data link at the bottom of the sidebar lists any app connected to your account through
ChatGPT Actions or MCP, with its granted scopes, connection date, and a Revoke button, plus controls for
the data those apps have written about you.
A password reset drops your connections. Whenever your password changes — including an admin
resetting it for you — every signed-in session ends and every connected app is revoked. Reconnect
anything you rely on afterwards.
6. What to ask an admin for
These are the jobs the platform reserves for admin accounts. Opening the page yourself gives a "Not
available" notice.
• A new teacher or admin account, or a student account for someone without a UC Merced email
• A password reset

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• A guest promoted to student
• A new lab module, or a document attached to one
• A file uploaded, deleted, or made public/private
• A simulation uploaded
• A question bank imported from JSON
• A new retrieval practice question written
• An individual question edited
• A class handed to another teacher
• A lab's card order changed

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Appendix — Glossary
Term Meaning
Bank The pool of retrieval-practice questions attached to one lab.
Card flow The numbered order of the section cards on a lab landing page. Set by an
admin.
Competition Two or more classes grouped into one leaderboard, scored on average points
per enrolled student.
Flag A rule-based attention marker on a student, shown on the Retrieval progress
dashboard.
Locked lab A lab you have paused for one class. Still visible in that class's sidebar with a
padlock, but it will not open.
Mastery A 0–100 score combining prelab work (30%) and retrieval recall (70%).
Post-class engagement The 30-minute per-lab target of retrieval practice and simulation work
combined, counted only while a student is interacting.
Prelab progress What the AI tutor recorded about a student during their prelab sessions.
SRS Spaced repetition scheduling, how the retrieval tool decides when a student
sees a question again.
Teacher / faculty The same role. The database calls it faculty; the interface calls it Teacher.