Professor Alexa Alice Joubin created an open-access AI that helps students develop critical thinking skills. Her AI asks students questions instead of simply providing definitive answers. Her application is featured in EdTech in March 2025. The open-source, open-access tool is transparent about its reasoning process. When responding to a prompt, the AI-powered teaching assistant can also detect whether multiple sources would be applicable to the inquiry to create a comprehensive response.
Educators, according to Joubin, should encourage students to question AI’s outputs from a meta-critical perspective. The process, she says, could also help students build the skills they’ll need to identify the most trustworthy, relevant sources of information in the future as the amount of available data continues to grow. “It could guide us to think more critically,” Joubin says. “Practice makes perfect. AI could play a role.”