CourseChat: on‑premises multi-course RAG tutor for business education (arXiv:2610.02510v1)
The authors present CourseChat, an on-premises, multi-course retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) tutor deployed behind a campus web gateway and integrated for use with Moodle; it runs twin edge hosts with FastAPI, a local vector database, and an LLM served via Ollama across six isolated course CRNs. The paper reports two model bake-offs, a source-fidelity comparison, conversation and quiz audits, finds that larger models failed classroom speed constraints while 12B and 7B passed and a mixture-of-experts introduced new errors, and retains an 8B production model pending demonstrated overall improvement; the study does not evaluate learning gains or public-gateway acceptance.