- Client
- Lumen Education Group
- Industry
- EdTech
- Year
- 2025
- Duration
- 7 months
- Team
- 10 people
- Services
- AI & machine learningProduct strategyWeb platformUI/UX designData engineering
Lumen delivers online courses to over a million learners. Completion rates were low and support teams were overwhelmed by repetitive questions. We built an adaptive platform with a retrieval-based AI tutor grounded in each course's own material.
The challenge
Only 14% of learners finished the courses they started. Generic chatbots hallucinated answers and eroded instructor trust, and the content team could not personalise learning paths for different skill levels.
Our approach
We built a retrieval-augmented tutor that only answers from verified course content, cites its sources and asks guiding questions before giving solutions. An adaptive engine adjusts lesson order and practice difficulty based on mastery. Instructors get dashboards showing exactly where learners struggle, plus an evaluation suite that tests tutor quality before every release.
What we built
Grounded AI tutor
Answers are retrieved from course material with citations, keeping hallucination rates very low.
Adaptive learning paths
Content order and difficulty adjust to each learner's demonstrated mastery.
Evaluation harness
Automated test sets score the tutor on accuracy and pedagogy before each deploy.
Instructor insights
Heatmaps show which concepts lose learners so courses can be improved.
The results
- +0%
- Course completion rate
- 0.0M
- Learners served
- 0%
- Support questions resolved by the tutor
- <0%
- Flagged inaccurate answers
The AI tutor behaves like a patient teaching assistant. Syntheia's evaluation-first approach gave our academics real confidence to ship.
Technology
- Next.js
- FastAPI
- PostgreSQL + pgvector
- OpenAI & Claude APIs
- LangGraph
- Redis
- GCP
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