FAQ
Common questions, straight answers.
Is this replacing me as a teacher?
Only if you want it to. You’re the educator. In our home it does do most of the work and we are on the sidelines to enhance and refine where necessary. The system builds the daily content so you don’t have to. If your kid can run with this and do the work without you in the room then the system is perfectly happy to just cruise on autopilot and send you updates you can read at your leisure in the weekly digest. That's the whole point of hands off. If you want to be in the trenches doing the instruction then we give you pedagogically sound teacher guides for every lesson every day.
How can students get help?
Every student lesson page has an AI tutor bot (text only) that has all the background on that lesson and knows exactly what they're looking at in that section without having to be told anything to understand the context. It's night-and-day different from "go ask the AI what the answer is" (which then still lacks context about courses, units, assessments, etc.). We feed all that context in for you and give you an answer measured literally in milliseconds - and it's also tailored to the student's grade level so you're getting very different tutor bots in third grade than you do in high school. You can turn it off if you don't want it at all. It is strongly safety-oriented with multiple layers of guardrails. It will happily walk a student through the work or help a parent get more information to do their job. And if your kid says weird stuff to it we send you an email about that.
What does “hands-off” actually mean? Do I do anything?
You're resposible for the initial inputs to understand the student, the school, the home. This can take as little as twenty or thirty minutes. From here it's theoretically possible for the parent to never touch it again until it's time to run reports for the school district. The system generates, grades, and adapts on its own every day. You can be as involved as you want — leave parent notes (literally give it instructions in English as often as you want), review lessons beforehand,change how it's grading — or you can just let it run. When we say hands off we mean the daily drudgery of all the "not teaching" tasks is basically eliminated. There's nothing to set up or keep track of day to day in order for lessons to appear for the student.
What grades does this work for?
Third grade and up. The system assumes your child can read and write independently. That doesn't have to mean they're already working on the great American novel. It just means we aren't teaching reading and forming letters as part of our curriculum at any level. Optimistically, this is around third grade. If that's less true of your student then you might want to wait. The English lessons kick off with grade-appropriate literature right from third grade. If they're sending in photo based writing submissions the writing has to be legible enough to transcribe. You could always type this for them while they're still working on getting the kinks ironed out.
Accessibility accommodations?
Each student can be set as auditory or visual learners and they'll get some enhancements. All students at all levels have access to a text reader on the page but for auditory learners at younger grades the auditory flag makes it big and easy to use. Visual learners are going to get more images. As grades advance this includes more diagrams. Text settings can be set per student with different fonts, sizes, and spacings to customize readability.
What subjects are covered?
We are geared toward United States academic standards. English Language Arts 3-12, Science 3-8, Social Studies 3-12, Health, Economics and Government. We don’t cover ANY math or high school science. Sal Khan has given a tremendous gift to the world with his free tutoring videos and platform. We can't improve on Khan Academy for math or high school science. We focus on the subjects where personalized, narrative content makes the biggest difference.
What if we're not in the United States?
There's nothing stopping you from using this in other countries but there is no way to un-Americanize it at this time. You will have to pick an American state to set up the student. Course selection reflects American standards. English is the only language offered.
Is it all screen time?
There's reading that could be in books depending on what you set up. And science classes can have labs, and those labs can and will take you outside as appropriate if you list an outdoor resource in setup ("a half acre back yard" or "there's a park down the street" - it does take weather into account). We are of the opinion that we'll accept some screen time if it makes the school day more efficient, and it certainly can work that way.
Does my child have to type?
Grades 3-5 have the option of submitting writing assignments as photos of their hand-written responses. The system will transcribe it first and then grade the transcription. Each writing lesson has a button for this submission in three different places to make it extremely easy. You can even have it grade their penmanship as part of the rubric. If they want to type it they can do that, too. Sixth grade and higher, they do have to type the writing inputs.
Are there books?
There are no textbooks but the English curriculum for every grade is built around literature. This is a big part of how we build the ELA course syllabus. You can tell us what books you have access to and we'll fit the course around those if they're at all appropriate for the grade. We will give you suggestions for the recommended books in any ELA course. The recommendations are generally classics, chosen because they're in the public domain - meaning not only can you access free copies online but also these books are far more likely to be "known" by the AI and it can more successfully talk about their content and know the details of the texts. If you're determined to use Harry Potter it will build a unit on that just like it would on Tom Sawyer, it just won't be able to get into the details about it as accurately. If you have hard copy books in the home for other subjects you can enter these into the resources list, and tell the yearly planner to use them when it asks you to review the year's outline prior to making the lesson plans. It will do its best to work them in.
But what about discussions?
Good point and here's where your generic AI chatbots can really shine. Our tutor is designed for quick answers. If you want to have a drawn out conversation about Wuthering Heights we're all for it and the frontier model chat bots are fantastic for this. It's not part of our assigned curriculum in most cases because we can't control the outcome, but this is a perfect area for parent involvement. We absolutely love the Gemini app voice chat for deep talks.
Can I see lessons before my child does?
Yes, if you get there first. Lessons generate overnight and are available for your review before school starts. You can edit the lesson plan and regenerate, or give the ai notes on what to change and let it handle it.
How does it personalize to my child’s interests?
During setup, you tell us what your child is into — animals, space, cars, whatever. Those interests show up in lesson examples, reading passages, and writing prompts. A kid who loves marine biology gets science explained through ocean ecosystems. Especially for older students with detailed inputs, this is powerful stuff. It’s not a gimmick; it’s how the content is built.
How does it personalize to our family and educational values?
This might be the best part. Before touching any curriculum design we ask you to build the school's "Theme" by answering some questions about: Educational Philosophy, Tone & Voice, What to Lean Into, What to Avoid, Assessment Philosophy, and Values & Worldview. But we also give you presets for off-the-shelf philosophies that we call "archetypes." The archetype selection will fill these in for you either permanently or as a starting point for your own tweaks. Those options include Classical, Charlotte Mason, Eclectic, STEM, Montessori, Waldorf, College Prep,and Unschooling. We combine this with the student inputs and family resources to give you something that has never been possible on this individual student scale before.
What if I don't want the kids exposed to certain topics in Health class, etc?
Just say that in your Theme inputs. In the "What to avoid" section you can tell it what kinds of topics you don't want, specifically or broadly. It will also interpret certain types of religious Theme inputs this way automatically. It will take this into account when it builds the lesson plans, again when it builds the lessons, and again when it pulls supplemental videos. You can do the same thing in the student notes if it's different per-child.
Is the content AI-generated? Is it any good?
Yes, it’s AI-generated. And yes, it’s good — it is highly, highly customized and the AI is really, really smart because we made it that way. What is going on behind the scenes is so far beyond "give me a fifth grade lesson about Rome." Our prompt design and the analytic architecture is really the core of the product. Every lesson is built from your child’s profile, their recent work history, and your family’s educational philosophy. It's impossible to compare it to a canned curriculum because it's like having an entire department of educators focused just on your student and their specific inputs. The only thing you could really compare it to is having a full-time tutor who has set up the syllabus from scratch and even that doesn't really do it justice because we have nice pictures too.
Can I choose what LLM is used?
Yes, you get a global setting for which provider produces the content and this can be changed any time. We like Gemini (Google) and default to that, but you can also pick Anthropic (Claude), or Xai (Grok). Each one gives a slightly different flavor to the output. After extensive testing we chose not to include OpenAI (ChatGPT) because its responses were unusably short compared to the other providers.
Does the AI break?
AI infrastructure is still in its infancy and yes it can be unreliable at times. To
mitigate this, we run all the scheduled jobs at night when we're least likely to hit rate limits. If it
still fails (even after built-in retries) you get an email in the morning and have the option to try
re-triggering any missed jobs from there. If it fails at scale the alarms will mobilize teams of
developers around the world get us out of bed and
hopefully we find something we can fix before you know anything's wrong.
Are there videos?
In most subjects we will attempt to find a topical video in our database of videos from educational YouTube channels. It does this after the lesson is already generated by trying to match the topic to the database tags. It can't always find one. But quite often yes, there's a video that we consider a supplement.
What happens if we take a week off?
Hopefully you enjoy yourselves. You can set up holidays in advance and no lessons will generate. If you do this ahead of time (before the quarter lesson plans generate) the curriculum will fit around those breaks. You can set sick days that accommodate a missed day here and there and not skip ahead. All the usual school holidays will be built-in by default. You can override this as necessary. At the end of each quarter you can decide whether to overflow missed lessons into the new quarter (meaning it makes fewer lessons for the new quarter and fits that quarter's units into fewer lessons) or stay with the syllabus and abandon what you missed.
What happens if we don't finish the lesson?
Incomplete lessons block new lessons for that course on its next scheduled day so they won't pile up. If the incomplete work gets completed on that next lesson day you'll get an alert that lets you generate the next lesson on demand so you can run a normal class that day after finishing the previous lesson. You can choose to ignore it and you'll just run one day behind on the course's lesson plan, which is not a big deal and you'll have the option of flowing those missed lessons into the next quarter if you want to.
What if the school year already started?
No problem. If you come on board after the date you set as the start to the first quarter you'll get the option of telling us what you've already done, if anything. The curriculum guide will pick it up from there and fill in the remaining weeks. Or you can flex your quarters' dates however you want and set a full school year from any point in the calendar. The four-quarter architecture is baked in but the dates for it are up to you as long as you keep them between four and thirteen weeks.
Can I use this alongside other curricula?
Absolutely. Course selection is a la carte. One of the best utilizations of the Hands
Off platform (for older students especially) is to let us map out the course and the lessons, then invest
your parent effort to find really great video lectures that fit the lesson (or give them yourself if
that's your thing). Because our lesson engine is so
dynamic we can't always map videos to a given lesson plan the way a canned curriculum might. Parents can
easily
bridge this gap with a few minutes of searching.
And of course we openly recommend that you do all
your math and high school science on Khan Academy.
How does it handle state compliance?
If you use our recommended courses per state you should be covered for mandates (for example when health classes are mandated is different everwhere), but these change frequently so it's a good idea to independently research the specifics yourself each year for that grade. We track subjects, hours, and skills (and grades, obviously) covered across the year. The curriculum setup at onboarding time creates a yearly outline that forms the basis of the IHIP (Individualized Home Instruction Plan) in states that require it. You can generate a report each quarter, and a cumulative one at the end of the year. The report it makes will far exceed what any school districts expects.
Can I have multiple students?
Yes. Each student gets their own setup. They’re completely independent except for your school calendar and theme.
How does the trial work?
You get full access to everything for 14 days. But only the first five lessons will ever generate.
Is there an app?
Yes but it's only designed to be a mobile front end for the student work when a computer isn't available. Parent access is done in the browser, which works fine on mobile.
What do I need to get started?
A device for your student, and a starter session to set up their profile. No special software, no downloads, no hardware. If you can use a web browser, you can run your school.