AI Archives | ScholarRx

A New Way to Organize and Build Assessments in ScholarRx

Jeff Downing — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:33:52 +0000

Faculty spend a remarkable amount of time finding, reviewing, and assembling questions. Not because good items are hard to find, but because it is difficult to keep everything aligned, organized, and reusable across courses, terms, and teaching teams.

Today, we are introducing a new way to do that inside the ScholarRx Faculty Portal.

With today’s release, Pools and the updated Manage Assignments experience bring question organization, AI-powered discovery, and assessment building into a single, connected workflow.

One Place for Questions and Assessments

In the Faculty Portal, you will now find an Assignments section that includes both Manage Assignments and Manage Pools. This brings together two things faculty do every day: organizing questions and building exams.

Pools give you a simple way to create collections of questions based on a course, unit, topic, or exam. You might have a pool for Renal Pathology, one for Endocrine Review, or one for a CBSE review. You can add questions over time, remove ones you no longer need, and share pools with colleagues so everyone is working from the same curated set.

For faculty who already used pools in Qmax Management, those collections will appear automatically in the new experience. For others, this is a new and powerful way to start building a reusable question library.

Finding Questions with TAI

Pools are tightly connected to TAI, ScholarRx’s AI-powered teaching assistant.

When you open a pool, you can search for questions by topic, discipline, or organ system. You can paste in question IDs, enter keywords, or upload documents like syllabi, lecture slides, or readings. TAI analyzes what you provide and returns questions that best match your curriculum.

Each question is shown with rich context, including difficulty, past student performance, the question bank, and any images, audio, or video included in the item. This makes it easier to review and select questions with confidence.

Building a Living Question Library

As you search, you can add questions to a pool in one click, or select only the ones you want. Questions can live in more than one pool, and you can even create a new pool on the fly as you work.

Over time, this turns pools into a living library of questions that reflects how your program teaches and assesses, not just a single exam.

Pools can also be shared with individual instructors or faculty groups. Everyone with access can contribute to the pool and use it when building assignments, making it easier to collaborate across courses and teaching teams.

From Pools to Published Exams

Pools now connect directly to the way assignments are built.

Inside Manage Assignments, you can select one or more pools, apply filters like question bank, difficulty, and usage status, and even upload course documents. Before running a search, TAI shows a plain-language summary of what it is about to look for, so you always know what is driving the results.

This means TAI is no longer searching everything in the system. It is searching the exact question set you define.

Designed for How Faculty Actually Work

This release is about more than new features. It is about creating a workflow that matches how faculty teach, collaborate, and assess.

With Pools, TAI, and the updated Assignments experience working together, it becomes easier to find aligned questions, organize them for future use, and build assessments that best reflect your curriculum.

We look forward to seeing how you and your teams use these tools to make assessment creation more consistent, efficient, and connected across ScholarRx.

The post A New Way to Organize and Build Assessments in ScholarRx appeared first on ScholarRx.

Reclaiming Faculty Time with TAI: The AI Teaching Assistant Built for Medical Education

Nikki Crowell — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 21:13:02 +0000

Medical educators face an impossible choice: spend hours converting PowerPoint decks into interactive modules and crafting board-style assessment questions, or shortchange curriculum quality. What if you didn’t have to choose?

At ScholarRx, we believe AI should amplify faculty expertise, not replace it. That’s why we built TAI (Teaching with Artificial Intelligence), an AI assistant embedded directly in ScholarRx that transforms legacy content into interactive modules and generates draft assessment questions in minutes, not hours.

What is TAI?

TAI is an integrated AI Teaching Assistant that works within the ScholarRx platform you already use. Unlike ChatGPT or other general-purpose AI tools that require copying and pasting content between applications, TAI operates directly alongside you as you build, adapt, and assess curriculum.

What makes TAI different is its agentic framework. Rather than simply responding to prompts, TAI actively guides you through each phase of the curriculum development cycle in a structured sequence. Think of it as having a junior faculty colleague who not only handles time-intensive tasks but also helps you think through the pedagogical implications of each choice by breaking complex development into manageable, logical steps.

Designed to Solve Real Faculty Challenges

TAI addresses the two most pressing bottlenecks in medical education today.

Transforming Legacy Content into Interactive Learning

Many medical schools possess years of valuable content, PowerPoints, PDFs, lecture notes, trapped in static formats. Converting these into structured, interactive learning experiences typically requires significant faculty time and effort.

TAI changes that equation through a structured, collaborative process. When using Bricks Create with TAI, it evaluates your source material and prompt, then begins by developing learning objectives that you can revise, reorder, or regenerate. From there, it drafts an outline so you can think through the structure of your brick and make adjustments before committing to full content development. Once you’ve approved the outline, TAI drafts the brick, which you can then review, optimize, and shape to meet your specific needs.

This phased approach ensures you maintain pedagogical control at each decision point while TAI handles the heavy lifting of content transformation.

The result: Accelerated curriculum modernization with thoughtful pedagogical design, not just automated conversion.

High-quality, board-style assessment writing is both essential and exhausting. Writing questions that align with specific learning objectives while meeting NBME standards can take hours per item.

Integrated with Qmax, TAI uses its agentic framework to guide assessment development. Rather than just generating questions, it helps you think through: What cognitive level should this assess? Which common misconceptions should distractors address? How does this align with your learning objectives? Then it generates draft questions based on your specific needs.

You maintain complete control, reviewing, editing, and approving each item, but TAI’s structured approach helps ensure both efficiency and quality from the start.

Why TAI is Different

While AI tools are proliferating across industries, TAI was built for one purpose: to serve the medical education community.

It’s grounded in four principles that distinguish it from generic AI:

Agentic Intelligence

TAI doesn’t wait for you to know what to ask. Its agentic framework proactively guides you through curriculum and assessment development, helping you think through each phase systematically while maintaining your academic freedom and expertise.

Expert-Backed Foundation

TAI leverages ScholarRx’s peer-reviewed library of Rx Bricks and Qmax questions, with its trusted, validated content developed by medical educators, not scraped from the open internet.

Purpose-Built Intelligence

Unlike general AI that might confuse medical terminology or miss curricular nuances, TAI is designed specifically for medical curriculum design, assessment alignment, and the precision required in high-stakes education.

Security & Faculty Control

All work stays within the secure ScholarRx platform. Your institutional content is never used to train commercial AI models. You maintain complete confidentiality and control: no uploading files to third-party tools, no data leakage, no compliance concerns.

Empowering Faculty Through Time Efficiency

The mission behind TAI is straightforward: return time to educators so they can focus on teaching, mentorship, and innovation.

By automating the most time-consuming aspects of curriculum and assessment creation, while actively guiding you through sound instructional design, TAI helps you invest energy where it creates the greatest impact: supporting student learning and improving educational outcomes.

Consider this scenario: A curriculum committee needs to modernize their neuroscience unit, converting 15 legacy PowerPoint lectures into interactive modules with aligned assessments. Traditionally, this might require 40+ faculty hours. With TAI’s phased approach, developing learning objectives first, then outlines, then full content, the committee can make strategic decisions at each stage while TAI handles content generation. What once took weeks now takes days, leaving faculty to focus on refinement, sequencing, and pedagogical strategy.

See TAI in Action

The true promise of AI in education isn’t automation for automation’s sake; it’s intelligent collaboration. With TAI’s agentic framework, institutions can modernize faster, improve efficiency, and keep faculty expertise at the center of every decision while benefiting from structured, thoughtful guidance through enriched development processes.

Ready to see how TAI can reshape your workflow?
Discover TAI: Your AI Teaching Assistant

The post Reclaiming Faculty Time with TAI: The AI Teaching Assistant Built for Medical Education appeared first on ScholarRx.

Introducing Bricks with TAI: A Faster, Framework-Driven Way to Build Curriculum

Nikki Crowell — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 15:38:07 +0000

Every medical educator knows the challenge: you have expertise to share, students eager to learn, and never enough time to create the high-quality, interactive educational content your curriculum deserves. Bricks with TAI (Teaching with Artificial Intelligence) accelerates your curriculum development process while maintaining the educational quality and personal touch that makes your teaching effective.

What Makes TAI Different?

TAI isn’t another general-purpose AI tool that generates content without context or accountability. It’s purpose-built for medical education, incorporating established instructional design frameworks like the Kern 6-Step Process and ADDIE methodology. TAI lives inside Bricks Create, so your existing workflows remain unchanged. Most importantly, educators remain in the lead throughout the entire process.

Unlike platforms where anyone can generate educational content without oversight, TAI ensures that every brick has an identifiable educator taking responsibility for its quality and accuracy. Your name is on the content you create with TAI’s assistance, and you maintain complete control over the educational outcomes.

How TAI Works: A Structured Approach to Curriculum Development

TAI functions like having a team of specialized instructional designers working alongside you. The platform guides you through a five-step process:

Step 1: Define Your Vision

Start by describing what you want to create. Upload your source materials, whether it’s a PowerPoint presentation, research article, or lecture notes. Tell TAI about your specific needs: “I need a 30-minute presentation on wellbeing for Canadian healthcare workers” or “Create a brick about clinical reasoning for shortness of breath.”

Step 2: Refine Learning Objectives

TAI analyzes your materials and suggests learning objectives aligned with Bloom’s taxonomy (typically levels 1-3). You can edit, modify, add, or delete these objectives to match your specific educational goals. Looking for more Canadian examples? Want to emphasize particular clinical scenarios? Just tell TAI what you need.

Step 3: Build Your Content Outline

TAI creates a comprehensive outline with multiple sections and embedded formative assessments. You can move sections around, directly edit content, and request specific modifications. The platform responds to natural language requests like “add more physiology examples” or “create a stressed-out health professional persona.”

Step 4: Generate Your Brick

TAI develops complete brick content—up to 4,000 words—based on your specifications. The platform drafts engaging, interactive content that aligns with your learning objectives and incorporates your requested modifications.

Step 5: Optimize and Collaborate

Review your brick at both macro and micro levels. You can regenerate entire sections, make targeted edits to specific parts, or fine-tune individual elements. Once you’re satisfied, you can move it into Bricks Create and invite co-authors to collaborate, then move through the same peer review process used for all ScholarRx content.

Real-World Example: Faculty Development

Consider this scenario: Canadian medical schools need to address healthcare worker wellbeing. Using TAI, an educator can:

Upload existing presentation materials about wellness

Specify the need for Canadian-specific examples and French language capability

Request a 20-minute interactive learning experience

Include case studies featuring stressed healthcare professionals

Generate culturally appropriate content that addresses local healthcare challenges

The result? A comprehensive, engaging educational resource created in a fraction of the time while maintaining educational rigor.

Addressing Common Concerns

Will AI replace my expertise? No. TAI amplifies your expertise rather than replacing it. You provide the vision, context, and educational goals. TAI handles the time-intensive tasks of content structuring, initial drafting, and formatting, allowing you to focus on what you do best: teaching and mentoring.

How do I know the content is accurate? Every TAI-generated brick goes through the same rigorous peer review process as traditionally created content. You review and approve all content before publication. TAI provides transparency about its involvement and maintains data privacy protocols throughout the process.

Can TAI work with my existing materials? Yes. TAI can transform various source materials—PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, lecture transcripts, or even rough notes—into structured, interactive educational content. It’s designed to revitalize existing resources and help you transition toward active learning approaches.

Getting Started with TAI

TAI is currently available in open beta for institutional partners. To access it:

Enable beta features: Toggle the beta option in your account settings

Launch TAI: Click the TAI icon in your brick development environment

Start creating: Upload your materials and begin the guided process

The platform supports multiple languages and can create content tailored to specific cultural contexts, making it ideal for the global curricular ecosystem supported by the Rx Brick Exchange.

Ready to Transform Your Curriculum Development?

Bricks with TAI isn’t about replacing the art of teaching. It’s about giving you the tools to practice that art more effectively. Whether you’re developing new content, revitalizing existing materials, or creating resources for faculty development, TAI can help you achieve your educational goals more efficiently.

The future of medical education lies not in choosing between human expertise and artificial intelligence, but in thoughtfully combining both to create learning experiences that are more engaging, more accessible, and more effective than either could achieve alone.

Quality Assurance and Transparency

Every TAI-generated brick maintains full transparency about AI involvement. This transparency, combined with peer review, ensures that AI enhancement doesn’t compromise educational integrity.

TAI also maintains strict data privacy protocols, ensuring that your educational materials and student information remain secure throughout the development process.

The Future of Medical Education

By handling routine instructional design tasks, TAI frees educators to focus on innovation, mentorship, and the human connections that make learning meaningful.

Early adopters are already seeing results. Several schools have published TAI-assisted bricks, and feedback indicates that educators appreciate both the time savings and the enhanced quality of their educational content.

Ready to get started? Log into your ScholarRx account, enable beta features, and discover how TAI can transform your approach to curriculum development. Both your students and your schedule will benefit.

The post Introducing Bricks with TAI: A Faster, Framework-Driven Way to Build Curriculum appeared first on ScholarRx.

March 2025 Release – Empowering Faculty with AI-Enhanced Assessment Tools

Jeff Downing — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 14:59:14 +0000

Empowering Faculty with AI-Enhanced Assessment Tools

We're excited to announce our latest platform update, which introduces significant enhancements to the ScholarRx ecosystem. This release focuses on streamlining the faculty experience through integrated assessment workflows, AI-powered content creation, and deeper analytics—all designed to save time while improving educational outcomes.

Meeting the Evolving Needs of Medical Education

Medical education faces unprecedented challenges: increasing knowledge density, accelerating scientific discoveries, and the need to prepare students for complex healthcare environments. Faculty members are asked to do more with the same amount of time—create engaging assessments, provide meaningful feedback, and continuously adapt their teaching strategies based on student performance.

This release addresses these challenges by integrating enhanced assessment tools directly into the faculty workflow, leveraging AI to accelerate content creation, and providing deeper insights into student learning patterns.

Integrated Test Management in Faculty Portal

We've reimagined how faculty create and manage assessments by integrating the "Manage Assignments" feature directly into the Faculty Portal. This consolidation eliminates the need to navigate between different applications, creating a seamless workflow from test creation to analysis.

The new interface organizes assessments into three categories—Published, Drafts, and Closed—making it simple to track the status of each test at a glance. Faculty can see key information including test type, assignment dates, question count, and student progress without having to open each test individually.

To facilitate a smooth transition, tests created in the original Qmax Management application will appear in the new "Manage Assignments" experience, and vice versa. Faculty can continue using either system during the transition period, with all changes synchronized between both interfaces.

AI-Powered Test Creation Methods

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this release is the introduction of two innovative methods for creating assessments, both leveraging advanced AI capabilities.

Question Assistant

The Question Assistant uses teaching with AI (TAI) to streamline the question discovery process. Faculty can:

Upload documents to find questions that align with their content
Enter natural language descriptions of the desired assessment
Target specific question banks using the # symbol (e.g., #Qmax1)
Focus on particular topics using the @ symbol (e.g., @Purine salvage deficiencies)

Results display comprehensive metadata for each question, including a new, intuitive difficulty rating system (Easy/Medium/Hard) that replaces the traditional P-value. Faculty can also see if questions have been used in previous assessments, helping prevent unintentional duplication.

High-Yield Topic Explorer

For faculty who prefer a more structured approach, the High-Yield Topic Explorer provides a hierarchical tree of medical topics organized by organ systems and disciplines. This method allows faculty to browse through categories, select relevant areas, and generate question sets based on their chosen topics.

The explorer includes filtering options by keyword, topic, discipline, organ system, and "Not Used Since" date, providing precise control over question selection. Faculty can even hide correct answers during the selection process to maintain objectivity when building assessments.

Both methods culminate in a drag-and-drop interface for arranging questions, followed by a streamlined process for configuring assessment parameters such as timing, availability, and student assignments.

Enhanced Analytics for Data-Driven Teaching

Our new Assignment Analysis page provides faculty with comprehensive insights into student performance. The analysis is divided into two complementary views:

Performance by Students: Displays individual student progress, including test status, submission date, performance metrics, and attempt history. Faculty can see not only how many questions each student got right or wrong but also track multiple attempts when retakes are enabled.
Performance by Question: Shows how the entire cohort performed on each question, with counts of correct, incorrect, and unanswered responses. Questions can be sorted by their original order, by most difficult, or by least difficult, helping faculty quickly identify challenging concepts.

Faculty can download detailed Excel reports containing student results and question performance data, facilitating deeper offline analysis or integration with other institutional assessment systems.

Using TAI to Create Questions Based on Bricks

We've further integrated our Brick content with assessment workflows by enabling TAI-driven question generation directly from ScholarRx Bricks. Faculty with the 'Faculty Qmax Author' role can now generate questions in three styles:

Basic Recall: Simple recall questions without clinical scenarios
Short Clinical: Brief clinical scenarios (≤ 30 words)
Extended Clinical: Comprehensive clinical vignettes (50+ words) in USMLE style

This feature better connects learning content and assessment, ensuring tight alignment between what students learn and how they're evaluated. The generated questions can be reviewed, regenerated with specific instructions, and rated for accuracy before being saved to your organization's bank.

Student-Centered Improvements

Students benefit from this release as well, with enhanced options for test retakes and detailed performance analytics:

Self-created tests can be retaken an unlimited number of times
Faculty-created tests can allow retakes when enabled during creation
Students can view detailed statistics for each test attempt
Performance breakdowns by difficulty, discipline, and organ system help students identify areas for focused study

These features encourage a growth mindset by allowing students to learn from their mistakes and track their improvement over time.

Additional Enhancements

Several other notable improvements round out this release:

Institutional Onboarding Reports: Cohort Managers can download comprehensive reports on onboarding completion
Streamlined Qmax Create Access: Direct menu options for Qmax Create from various applications
Organizational Roster Filtering: New ability to filter the roster by accommodation status
Faculty Portal Renaming: The "Stats & Analytics" dashboard has been renamed to "Faculty," reflecting its expanded role as a comprehensive platform

Looking Ahead

This release represents a significant step in our ongoing mission to create the most effective, efficient, and user-friendly platform for medical education. The integration of TAI, streamlined workflows, and enhanced analytics sets the foundation for even more innovation in the future.

The Manage Assignments feature is currently available as a beta option, which can be enabled from your profile menu in the Faculty Portal. We encourage all faculty to try these new features and provide feedback as we continue to refine and expand our platform.

Thank you for being part of the ScholarRx community. We're excited to see how these tools enhance your teaching and your students' learning experiences.

For more details, visit our Knowledge Base or contact us directly.

The post March 2025 Release – Empowering Faculty with AI-Enhanced Assessment Tools appeared first on ScholarRx.

Unlock the Power of GenAI in Health Professions Education

Kathryn Kleist — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 13:28:58 +0000

The rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping industries across the globe, and health professions education (HPE) is no exception. As educators seek innovative ways to enhance learning experiences, GenAI offers unprecedented opportunities. To harness the full potential of this powerful tool, a deep understanding of prompt engineering is essential.

Using GenAI to Create Personalized Learning Experiences

Our upcoming focus session, led by expert Tao Le, MD, will demystify generative AI and equip you with the skills to master prompt engineering. You’ll learn to craft precise instructions that guide generative AI to generate the desired outputs, from creating interactive case studies to developing personalized learning modules. Please join us on Wednesday, July 24th at Noon Eastern to learn more about prompt engineering and the new AI tools available within the ScholarRx platform.

During this hands-on session, participants will explore real-world HPE scenarios and practice developing effective prompts. Dr. Le will share valuable insights on best practices, common pitfalls, and strategies to optimize GenAI for maximum impact. Together, we’ll introduce prompt engineering and generative AI, explore the importance of context, specificity, and clarity when creating prompts, and discuss common techniques, including zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompts.

Key Takeaways:

Understand the potential of generative AI in HPE
Master the art of prompt engineering
Develop practical skills for applying GenAI in your teaching
Identify and avoid common generative AI challenges

Whether you’re a seasoned educator or just starting to explore the possibilities of GenAI, this session is designed to empower you to leverage this transformative technology.

Take advantage of this opportunity to stay ahead of the curve in HPE – as recent conferences have shown, AI isn’t going anywhere! We’re excited by the opportunity to put AI to use as we craft personalized, engaging learning experiences for learners. Register now to save your spot in Dr. Tao Le’s focus session on Wednesday, July 24th.

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