Interventions define the situations in which Proactive Tutor may offer help or acknowledge progress. Creators select the allowed moments; learners keep the normal course experience and can decline a conversation.
What the learner sees
After repeated incorrect answers, the learner may receive a small help bubble while quiz feedback stays visible. Opening it begins a tutor conversation. Encouragement and congratulations can be short messages without action buttons. Silence is also a valid response.
The intended benefit is support at a useful moment. Time and activity counts are signals to consider, rather than diagnoses of understanding or motivation.
Choose interventions step by step
- Open the course editor’s Settings → Proactive Tutor and enable the master switch.
- Review Dynamic at the top of Interventions. It can permit an additional reflective offer; it cannot override a category you have disabled.
- Scroll down and enable the individual moments in the table below. Start with the ones you can meaningfully review in your course.
- Save and apply the course settings through your normal publishing and review workflow.
Turning the master switch off stops proactive messages while retaining the individual selections. For sustained difficulty, help does not depend on the model’s decision. Other eligible moments can remain quiet. Closing an offer prevents repeats from unchanged evidence.
Available interventions
| Intervention | Current evidence used | What it permits |
|---|---|---|
| Dynamic | Learner-reported low confidence or meaningful reading/flashcard activity, subject to the other policy checks. | An additional reflective help bubble. It cannot turn disabled intervention categories back on. |
| Repeated mistakes | Three incorrect automatically graded answers in a row; or at least two incorrect answers with at least half incorrect. | Reliable help after three consecutive errors, regardless of earlier correct answers. Other repeated errors can also qualify. I don’t know counts as incorrect. Sparse errors do not qualify. |
| Failed retries | Two consecutive completed attempts below 60%, with current evidence of difficulty. Successful or ungraded attempts break the streak. | Help after another attempt still shows difficulty. This control is independent of Repeated mistakes. |
| Project setbacks | At least one graded project submission and a best recorded result below 60%. | An offer to review the task or feedback. Missing grades do not count as failure. |
| Long pause on a question | Two minutes of visible, focused time on the same unanswered question, followed by at least eight seconds without input. | A neutral help bubble. A pause alone cannot open the tutor automatically. |
| Long pause while reading | Five minutes of visible, focused time without meaningful scroll progress, followed by at least eight seconds without input. | A neutral help bubble. Moving at least two percentage points in either direction resets the pause timer. |
| Celebrate progress | A completed quiz with at least three automatically graded answers and at least 80% correct, or a project result of at least 80%. | Congratulations without an action button or claim of mastery. |
| Encourage practice | At least three flashcards viewed or three graded answers, without a current pattern of difficulty. | Brief recognition of practice without an action button. Viewing cards does not prove understanding. |
These thresholds are current product defaults, not creator-editable fields. They are initial design hypotheses, not research-established cutoffs for every subject or learner.
Timing and learner control
- Difficulty help bubbles need no feedback or input delay. Other check-ins wait for at least eight seconds without input.
- The tutor opens only when the learner clicks a bubble or the ordinary tutor control.
- Hidden or unfocused tabs do not accumulate pause time.
- A response is discarded if the learner changes question, activity, answers, focus, before it arrives. Input alone does not block a difficulty bubble.
- Closing a bubble hides that offer. There is no snooze timer.
- Unchanged evidence does not repeat a closed offer. New difficulty can trigger another bubble immediately. The tutor never opens automatically.
What the evidence can tell us
Automatically graded multiple-choice and true/false answers can show a pattern of incorrect responses. They do not, on their own, identify the learner’s exact misconception. Project support currently uses the recorded score, rather than a detailed model of each rubric concept.
Reading time, scrolling, and cards viewed describe activity. They do not establish comprehension, emotion, motivation, disability, or ability. A useful tutor asks a diagnostic question instead of treating a signal as a diagnosis.
For the learner-facing experience and guidance on choosing a useful response, see Proactive Tutor.
Check one scenario at a time
- Enable the intervention you want to review. Leave Dynamic off when isolating a specific evidence rule.
- Use a test learner and produce the evidence in that row, such as two incorrect automatically graded answers in a topic with at least half incorrect.
- Keep the tab visible and focused. Difficulty help needs no extra feedback delay. For a pause check, keep the question unanswered.
- Compare the observed response with What it permits. The exact message is generated and is not guaranteed.
- Close a bubble and confirm it stays closed for unchanged answers. Submit another incorrect answer to check a fresh offer.
- Review relevance and interruptions alongside subsequent learner work. Use Enable and review adaptive learning for the full course checklist.
Right-click a proactive tutor bubble and choose Never show this again to permanently turn off proactive messages for your account in this course, across topics and future visits. You can still open the tutor yourself. Closing a bubble normally only hides that offer; there is no snooze timer.