Teaching involves two jobs. The first job — the one you trained for — is the actual teaching: standing up, explaining, answering questions, inspiring. The second job is the one that eats your evenings and weekends: building quiz banks, writing study guides, making flashcard decks, answering the same "can you explain this one more way?" question twenty times in office hours.

This tutorial is about the second job. Specifically: how to eliminate 70% of it using Ritsu as an instructional aide for your students.

The pitch is simple. You upload your lecture material once. Ritsu becomes a 24/7 study partner that your students can use to drill, ask questions, and review — using your course's material and your course's conventions. You get your evenings back. Your students get unlimited office hours. Nobody has to get a tutor from outside the department.

If you've ever wished your students arrived at office hours with better questions, or wished you could clone yourself during exam week, this is the tutorial for you.

Prerequisites

A Ritsu account. The free tier works for small courses (~1 section, ~30 students, light usage). For standard college courses the Education tier is designed for this — built-in classroom management and per-student progress dashboards. Contact support for institutional pricing.
Your existing course material: slide decks, lecture notes, textbook chapters, past problem sets, past exams (optional but huge boost). You'll upload all of it.
Your syllabus or a brief document describing the course structure (topics in order, dates, assessments, learning outcomes).
An afternoon — 2-4 hours — for setup. This is your only heavy-lift. After that it's maintenance in minutes, not hours.

What you'll build

A Ritsu project containing every piece of your course material, indexed and cross-referenced.
Auto-generated quizzes for each topic, aligned with your stated learning outcomes.
A student-facing portal (via shared project link) where your students can study with Ritsu at any time, scoped to YOUR course's content and idioms.
Teacher analytics showing which concepts your class is struggling with — so you can adjust lectures in real-time.

Your students get a 24/7 TA. You get data on where their understanding is breaking down. Everyone wins except the textbook company selling $300 online homework systems that do 10% of this.

Steps

1. Define your course structure up front

Before you upload anything, take 15 minutes to write (or copy-paste) a short document with:

Course name + level (e.g. "Intro to Linear Algebra, undergraduate sophomore level")
Topics in order (the 10-14 major topics your course covers, in the sequence you teach them)
Learning outcomes per topic (what students should be able to do at the end of each topic — phrased as action verbs: "compute eigenvalues of a 3x3 matrix" not "understand eigenvalues")
Conventions you use (notation, preferred methods, things you explicitly do or don't expect students to memorise)
Assessment structure (how many exams, weighting, the general style — e.g. "3 midterms, heavily computational, no proof-based problems")

This document is 1-2 pages. It's the most important upload — everything Ritsu does downstream keys off it. Without it, Ritsu defaults to generic conventions that may not match yours.

2. Upload your material in the right order

Create a Ritsu project named after your course ("Math 204 Linear Algebra — Fall 2026"). Upload in this order:

Course structure doc from step 1 — load this first, it sets context.
Syllabus (if different from structure doc).
Slide decks — all of them, in lecture order. Name each slide deck clearly by topic ("L01 - Linear Systems and Gaussian Elimination").
Lecture notes — if you write them separately from slides.
Textbook chapters — if you use a textbook, upload the relevant chapters. If your institution's rights allow, full textbook.
Problem sets and solutions — upload both; Ritsu uses the solutions to learn your preferred problem-solving style.
Past exams — if you have 2-3 past exams, these are gold. They teach Ritsu what your real assessments look like so its practice questions mirror them.

Order matters. Ritsu processes sequentially and later uploads are tagged against earlier context. Uploading the syllabus last means quizzes won't know what order the topics appear in.

3. Calibrate with a sanity check

Before rolling this out to students, spend 30 minutes calibrating Ritsu to your teaching. Type:

/quiz — 5 questions at the level I'd give on my first midterm, covering [topics 1-3]

Take the quiz. Grade it. Is it the right difficulty? The right style? Does it cover what you'd actually test?

If not, push back:

The questions are too computation-heavy. My midterm has more conceptual questions. Regenerate with that mix in mind.

Or:

Question 3 uses notation I don't use. I write vectors with arrows, not bold. Regenerate respecting my course's notation.

Calibrate until you'd be comfortable if a student happened upon one of these questions. This takes 3-5 rounds typically. Worth every minute — it makes the tool actually useful rather than "close enough."

Test a few common student questions too:

/eli5 the intuition behind eigenvalues

Compare the explanation to how you'd explain it. If it diverges, correct:

I always emphasize the geometric interpretation first. Redo the explanation starting from the transformation-that-stretches-but-doesn't-rotate intuition.

Ritsu adjusts and uses your preferred explanation going forward in the project.

4. Roll out to students (the 10-minute onboarding)

Once calibrated, share the project with your students. Ritsu gives you a shareable link that scopes student access to your course material only — they can't wander off into other topics or ask questions about other courses' material.

Create a 10-minute onboarding:

Send students the project link + brief instructions (the three or four commands that matter: /eli5, /quiz, /solve, /flashcard).
Hold one 10-minute walkthrough in your first lecture. Show them how to ask a question, how to take a quiz, how to review flashcards.
Assign a tiny first-week activity: "take the Topic 1 quiz in Ritsu and bring any questions that stumped you to office hours."

This onboarding is critical. Students who see the tool in use adopt it immediately; students who are just emailed a link often never click.

5. Monitor, iterate, adjust

Ritsu gives you a teacher dashboard showing:

How often students are using the tool (by topic)
Which concepts have the lowest quiz scores (class-wide)
Which students are actively engaging vs. not

Every week, spend 10 minutes reviewing:

/analytics — what are my students struggling with this week?

You'll see specific insights: "Class-wide, 60% of students are failing questions about orthogonal complements. Most common mistake: confusing orthogonal complements with kernel." That's gold for your next lecture — you can spend 15 minutes addressing the exact misconception, rather than pretending everyone's tracking.

Also adjust the tool over time:

Actually, add a note to the orthogonal complements topic — students keep mixing it up with kernel. Make sure future explanations explicitly disambiguate.

Ritsu tags this correction. Future student interactions with that topic will proactively surface the distinction.

Troubleshooting

"My department has concerns about students using AI." Fair. The student-facing Ritsu scoped to your materials is NOT the same as giving students ChatGPT. It's a tutor using your content, teaching your way. Frame it that way to your department — it's closer to a chatbot-powered office hours than to "students getting AI-generated answers from the internet." Also: it's auditable. You can see what students asked and what Ritsu told them. Cheating-detection-wise, that's a net gain over the current state.

"I don't want students to get answers handed to them." Configure Ritsu's student mode with /teacher-settings — students must not receive complete solutions on graded problems. Instead, Ritsu should ask Socratic questions to guide the student. Ritsu enforces this. Students still get a tutor; they don't get an answer-dispenser.

"I have a big course with 400 students." The per-student analytics still work at scale. For very large courses, use topic-level analytics for class decisions (lecture focus) and individual-level for at-risk students. Don't try to personally review all 400 students' dashboards weekly — that defeats the automation.

"I'm worried about Ritsu giving wrong answers." Every math/physics/engineering teacher has this fear. It's real and it has to be mitigated. Two things: (a) the calibration step above — spend time making Ritsu use your conventions — catches most issues. (b) For graded content, Ritsu marks answers with "this is how I'd approach it — verify against your course's expected method." Not a guarantee of correctness, but it puts the right expectation in students' heads. Over a semester, students develop the habit of double-checking Ritsu's answers in your lectures/notes, which is exactly what you want.

"This seems like it will make me redundant." It won't. It makes the tedious part of teaching (repetitive explanations, grading practice quizzes, answering FAQ in office hours) cheap. What remains — connecting with students, designing the course, explaining things in new ways when a student is truly stuck, mentoring — is the part that never scales with a chatbot. Ritsu doesn't replace teachers; it replaces the portions of the teaching job that always felt more like copy-paste than like teaching.

Try it yourself

Your next semester starts when? If it's more than a week away, you have time to build this right and roll it out when class begins. If you're mid-semester, the rollout still works — students adopt tools that help them even mid-term.

Budget an afternoon for the setup (steps 1-3) and another 30 minutes for the student rollout. That's a one-time 4-5 hour investment to save yourself 40-60 hours of office hours over the semester, plus give your students dramatically better support.

The returns compound: each semester you refine the project based on what you learned. By year two it's an institutional asset that outlasts any single cohort.

Click below to start building your course. Ritsu will walk you through the structure setup and upload flow.