Date
Publisher
arXiv
While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in student-facing educational tools, their potential to directly support educators through locally deployable and customizable solutions remains underexplored. Many existing approaches rely on proprietary, cloud-based systems that raise significant cost, privacy, and control concerns for educational institutions. To address these barriers, we introduce an end-to-end, open-source framework that empowers educators using small (3B-7B parameter), locally deployable LLMs. Our system is designed for comprehensive teacher support, including customized teaching material generation and AI-assisted assessment. The framework synergistically combines Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Context-Augmented Generation (CAG) to produce factually accurate, pedagogically-styled content. A core feature is an interactive refinement loop, a teacher-in-the-loop mechanism that ensures educator agency and precise alignment of the final output. To enhance reliability and safety, an auxiliary verifier LLM inspects all generated content. We validate our framework through a rigorous evaluation of its content generation capabilities and report on a successful technical deployment in a college physics course, which confirms its feasibility on standard institutional hardware. Our findings demonstrate that carefully engineered, self-hosted systems built on small LLMs can provide robust, affordable, and private support for educators, achieving practical utility comparable to much larger models for targeted instructional tasks. This work presents a practical blueprint for the development of sovereign AI tools tailored to the real-world needs of educational institutions.
Study at a glance
- Question: Can small, locally deployed language models effectively support educators in creating curriculum materials and assessments?
- Setting and data: A college physics course curriculum, OpenStax University Physics textbook, and 50 benchmark test prompts.
- Method: System development and prototype deployment with automated quantitative metrics and LLM-as-judge evaluation.
Why it matters
Proprietary cloud-based language models create cost, privacy, and sovereignty concerns for schools, while smaller models often produce factually incorrect content and lack educator-centric workflows.
Key findings
- Open-source 7B parameter models were competitive with Gemini 2.5 Pro on BERTScore, while Neural-Chat 7B achieved the highest ROUGE-1 (0.46) and METEOR (0.28) scores.
- Using an LLM judge, Gemini 2.5 Pro received the highest overall qualitative rating (4.72 out of 5), while Qwen2.5 7B scored highest among open-source models at 3.84.
- A 3B parameter auxiliary verifier model achieved 82 percent overall accuracy in detecting both off-topic prompts and unsafe or pedagogically unsound requests across 50 benchmark queries.
Summary drafted with AI from the full paper and may contain errors. See the full paper for details.
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