CoursePilot — AI Tutor That Meets You Where You Learn

AI Chrome extension that turns any online course into adaptive quizzes using Bloom's Taxonomy. 4 AI providers, <$1/course. Built for ADHD and diverse learners.

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Inspiration

I'd read a page three times and still not get it.

My brain doesn't process text linearly — I have ADHD, and passive reading is where information goes to die. I'd scroll through course after course, feeling productive but retaining nothing. 90% of online learners never finish their courses. 70% can't recall what they read. And zero courses adapt to how YOU learn.

I built CoursePilot because I needed it. Not a better course platform — the world has enough of those. I needed something that would work on ANY course I was already taking, turn passive scrolling into active learning, and do it for less than the cost of a cup of coffee.

The result: an AI tutor that lives in your browser, generates quizzes grounded in Bloom's Taxonomy (real cognitive science, not trivia), backs every explanation with verifiable web sources, and produces a professional PDF learning portfolio — all for less than $1 per course with Gemini Flash. No accounts. No data leaving your device. Just learning that actually sticks.

What it does

CoursePilot is a Chrome extension that attaches to any online course (Docsify, GitBook, ReadTheDocs, Educative, or any web page) and transforms passive reading into active learning.

Core Features:

  1. Bloom's Taxonomy Quiz Generation — AI generates questions at 6 cognitive levels: Remember → Understand → Apply → Analyze → Evaluate → Create. Each question includes 3-level progressive hints. Hint usage carries a -15% score penalty — incentivizing independent thinking.

  2. 4 Pluggable AI Providers — Your Choice, Your Budget — Anthropic Claude, OpenAI GPT-4o, Google Gemini Flash (< $1 for an entire course!), or any local gateway (Ollama, LM Studio) — completely free. For students and low-income learners, this makes AI-powered education accessible to anyone with a browser.

  3. Web-Grounded Research with You.com — Select any text and hit "Research" to get AI explanations backed by numbered citations, clickable web source cards, and related news articles — all without leaving the course page. In Listen Mode chat, toggle "Search web" to ground any AI response with verifiable sources. Three You.com APIs (Search, Express Agent, News) fire in parallel so research is fast and citation-backed, not just AI-generated text.

  4. PDF Learning Portfolio with Foxit — Export a professional certificate of mastery and a detailed study report as a single optimized PDF. Foxit's Document Generation API populates Word templates with your quiz data, Bloom's Taxonomy performance breakdowns, mastery scores, and questions to review. Foxit's PDF Services API then merges and compresses everything into one shareable document. No other project has Bloom's Taxonomy cognitive performance breakdowns in their PDFs.

  5. Adaptive Mastery Tracking — Per-page scores with 80% mastery threshold. Mastered topics are deprioritized. Struggling topics get extra attention. Progress persists across sessions.

  6. Listen Mode (AI Chat) — Ask questions about what you've read so far. The AI is scroll-aware: it only answers based on content you've actually seen, preventing spoilers.

  7. Explain This — Highlight any text and get instant, contextual explanations without leaving the page.

  8. Zero-Config Course Detection — Automatically detects Docsify, GitBook, and other course platforms. Works on any web page with text content.

How we built it

Architecture: Three-entrypoint Chrome extension built with WXT (modern extension framework), React 19, and TypeScript.

  • Content Script — FAB button, text selection popup (Explain + Research), page content extractor, Shadow DOM isolation
  • Background Worker — AI Provider Factory, message router, storage coordinator, Port manager for streaming, You.com research orchestrator, Foxit PDF pipeline
  • Side Panel (React) — Quiz View, Chat View, Research View, Progress View, Settings View

AI Provider Pattern: All 4 providers implement an identical AsyncGenerator streaming interface. The ProviderFactory instantiates the correct one based on user settings. Adding a new provider requires ~50 lines of adapter code.

Quiz Generation Pipeline: Extract page DOM → clean text → build prompt with Bloom's level distribution → stream response via browser.runtime.Port → parse structured JSON questions with hints and rubrics → evaluate free-response answers with partial credit scoring.

You.com Research Pipeline: Student selects text → three You.com APIs fire in parallel via Promise.allSettled (Search API for web sources, Express Agent for cited AI explanation, News API for current events) → results merge into a unified Research tab with inline citations and clickable source cards. Graceful degradation means one slow API never blocks the others.

Foxit PDF Pipeline: Aggregate quiz results + Bloom's performance + mastery scores from storage → populate two Word templates via Document Generation API → upload generated PDFs → combine certificate + report via PDF Services API → compress → download as a single optimized PDF.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Service Worker 30-second timeout — All state must survive worker restarts. We store everything in Chrome Storage and rehydrate on wake.

  2. Shadow DOM CSS isolation — Content script UI must not inherit course page styles. We inject our entire React UI inside a Shadow DOM with scoped Tailwind styles.

  3. Streaming through extension messaging — browser.runtime.sendMessage() is one-shot. For AI streaming, we use browser.runtime.Port for long-lived connections that pipe chunks in real-time.

  4. Bloom's Taxonomy prompt engineering — Getting AI to consistently generate questions at specific cognitive levels required extensive prompt iteration with structured JSON schemas.

  5. Cross-provider normalization — Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all have different streaming formats. Each provider implements its own parser behind the same interface.

  6. Parallel API orchestration for You.com — Running Search, Express Agent, and News APIs simultaneously while handling partial failures gracefully. Promise.allSettled was key — the Research tab renders whatever results come back, even if one API times out.

  7. Foxit template design — Getting Word templates to produce clean, professional PDFs with dynamic Bloom's Taxonomy tables and per-page progress bars required iterating on the template JSON schema to match Foxit's Document Generation API expectations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Pedagogically sound — grounded in 70 years of cognitive science (Bloom's Taxonomy, 1956, revised 2001)
  • Citation-backed learning — every research result links to real, verifiable web sources via You.com, not just AI-generated text
  • Professional PDF portfolio — a tangible artifact of learning with Bloom's Taxonomy cognitive breakdowns, powered by Foxit
  • Accessible to everyone — less than $1 to learn an entire course with Gemini Flash. Local models via Ollama make it completely free
  • Built for ADHD and diverse learners — active recall through quizzes, progress tracking as a reward system, and bite-sized interactions replace passive scrolling
  • 4 AI providers with identical interfaces — true provider independence
  • Zero setup — install extension, pick a course, start learning. No accounts, no course import
  • Privacy-first — API keys stored locally, never synced. No telemetry on learning content

What we learned

  • Bloom's Taxonomy is remarkably effective as an AI prompt constraint — it produces measurably better questions than "generate quiz questions"
  • Extension service workers are stateless by design, which forces better architecture
  • Streaming AI responses through Chrome extension messaging requires creative solutions (Port-based long-lived connections)
  • You.com's Express Agent API is uniquely suited for educational tools — it combines search and answer generation in one call, producing explanations with inline citations that students can actually verify
  • Foxit's Document Generation API turns structured JSON into polished PDFs surprisingly well — the template-based approach is more maintainable than programmatic PDF generation
  • Building for accessibility (ADHD, comprehension challenges, budget constraints) leads to better UX for everyone — the curb-cut effect in action

What's next for CoursePilot

  • Chrome Web Store publication
  • Visual mastery dashboard with learning path visualization
  • Spaced repetition scheduling (Anki-style review intervals)
  • Multi-course aggregation and cross-topic connections
  • Export quiz results and progress as PDF study guides
  • Deeper You.com integration: auto-research concepts the student struggles with during quizzes

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