Bringing AI into the VLE: how Kortext IQ was successfully piloted at Saïd Business School

Overview of impact

• Successfully piloted Kortext IQ within a secure, university-governed environment, benefitting from embedded learning materials and a pedagogically focused design.
• Expanded from an initial cohort of 340 MBA students to approximately 1,200 students across all degree programmes.
• Laid the foundations for hyper-personalised, data-driven learning at scale.

A world-leading business school with a global learner community

Saïd Business School is part of the University of Oxford and consistently ranks among the world’s leading institutions for business and management education.

The School delivers programmes to a highly diverse, global learner population, supporting over 50,000 students worldwide across in-person, online and international cohorts, with a strong emphasis on world-class learning experiences.

Enhancing the student learning experience

As part of its wider digital transformation strategy, Saïd Business School sought to explore how artificial intelligence could enhance the student learning experience for in-person, online and international learners.

Learning content and data were distributed across multiple repositories, limiting visibility into how students were engaging with materials and making it harder to deliver timely, personalised support at scale.

The School’s digital strategy focuses on agility, data and innovation, with a clear emphasis on identifying practical, value-driven applications of emerging technologies.

“Introducing this Kortext Canvas AI assistant is a really fundamental part of our new digital strategy, which focuses on agility, data and innovation. What we’re trying to do is provide new technology, whether it be through generative AI, agentic AI or workflow process automation, to make the school and more importantly the learner experience, enriched and more efficient. This new AI assistant will be a fundamental part of that.”

 

Mark Bramwell, Chief Digital Information Officer at Saïd Business School and Director of Strategic Digital Partnerships at the University of Oxford

The challenge was to identify a practical, responsible application of AI that could:

• Aggregate, surface and augment content from across systems
• Provide value at the right time to the right user
• Support a global learner population across different time zones and languages
• Operate within secure, university-governed systems, services and frameworks

Finding the right starting point meant balancing experimentation and innovation with trust, governance and long-term scalability.

Supporting secure, AI-enabled learning

For Saïd Business School, any AI initiative needed to align with its digital strategy and operate within requirements around data security, governance and interoperability.

Kortext IQ provided a ring-fenced, university-governed AI environment, ensuring all data remained securely within Oxford’s own domain and tenancy. This approach allowed AI to be embedded directly into the learning environment without changing how data was managed or governed.

As a global learning community, Saïd Business School also required an AI solution capable of supporting learners across different time zones and languages. Embedded directly within existing learning workflows, Kortext IQ enables learning content to be surfaced and translated, helping learners access relevant information at the right time, regardless of location or language.

This capability is particularly important given the volume and distribution of learning content across the School’s systems:

“We have a lot of unstructured data, data in different repositories, data that is siloed and what Kortext is helping us do is aggregate, surface and augment that data.”

 

Jyotveer Gill, Associate Director for Education Technology and Web Development, Saïd Business School

Integrating AI into the VLE

Saïd Business School partnered with Kortext to pilot Kortext IQ, integrated directly into Canvas, its existing virtual learning environment (VLE).

The pilot launched with a cohort of 340 MBA students, alongside faculty, instructional designers and programme teams.

By embedding the AI assistant within the VLE, learners and staff were able to access AI-supported functionality directly within their existing learning journey, without the need to adopt new platforms or workflows. The implementation provided greater visibility into user experience and behaviours, helping to inform how value could be added across programmes.

The solution enabled:

• AI-assisted interaction with learning content beyond traditional textbooks
• Access to content across multiple repositories through a single interface
• A user-centric experience designed to deliver the right information at the right time

Informing the next phase

As the pilot progressed, Saïd Business School has expanded access to over 1,200 students and established clear measures to assess the impact of AI-enabled learning across its programmes.

These measures focus on:

• Student engagement with learning content
• Visibility into which materials students interact with and where disengagement occurs
• Time savings for learners through AI-assisted content summarisation
• Improved efficiency for faculty and instructional designers through data-driven content recommendations

These insights are informing smarter course design, faster programme development and shaping the next phase of AI-enabled learning at the School.

Shaping the future of AI-enabled learning

The Kortext IQ pilot represents an important step in Saïd Business School’s AI journey, embedding AI directly into the learning environment in a way that aligns with the School’s values around security, governance and innovation.

Saïd Business School sees the potential to develop truly personalised learning pathways, extend access to new global audiences and continue evolving its digital ecosystem through responsible AI adoption.

“I’m excited to see how our pilot develops and how we progress it to the next stage. And that next stage could be around the development of truly personalised learning that allows a student and learner to build their own course or learning pathway”.

 

Mark Bramwell, Chief Digital Information Officer at Saïd Business School and Director of Strategic Digital Partnerships at the University of Oxford

See what Kortext IQ could look like in your institution – talk to the team to book a demo.