From Building Classroom AI to Teaching It

Shariq Shah builds the kind of tools that AI 300 teaches GGU students to evaluate. As CEO and co-founder of Edvisor, he leads a company transforming how college education is conducted at scale, helping schools retain more students while improving student outcomes through personalized learning materials. This fall, he joins GGU as instructor of the graduate-level course on applied AI and agents.

“AI has majorly disrupted the status quo of higher education: everything from how learning is done to the value of traditional learning content. In building Edvisor, I didn’t want AI to become something that simply gave students answers faster. I wanted to build something that helped them develop the right skills while giving faculty a way to preserve thinking, effort, and human connection.”

Building for the Classroom

Edvisor gives instructors a way to bring AI into their courses on their own terms. An instructor uploads a syllabus, and the platform produces readings and assessments tied to that course’s learning objectives.

For students, Edvisor’s AI teaching assistant is built to work as a grounded learning companion, not a generic chat experience. It answers questions at any hour and returns feedback measured against the instructor’s own rubric, with the reasoning behind every grade open to review. It also helps them build critical workplace skills through oral style examinations and discussions to demonstrate authentic mastery of the learning material.

Edvisor holds that AI in a course should deepen learning, and that learning to use AI well is itself part of the coursework. Graduates need to become AI-literate across all fields and Edvisor in AI 300 supports that objective.

A Founder’s Path

Edvisor is Shariq’s fourth company. Before this, he built and scaled Tutorly.ai, the world’s first GenAI homework assistant built for students, which spun off into Edvisor: a teacher and student facing platform.

Both with a ‘keyboard in his hand,’ he studied computer science at San José State University and has kept close ties to the campus since. He regularly returns to guest lecture in SJSU business classes and mentors early-stage founders through the university’s Silicon Valley Center for Entrepreneurship.

AI Across Every GGU Program

GGU opened in 1901 with evening classes in downtown San Francisco, built for adults who worked during the day. The university’s decision to integrate AI across 100 percent of its programs extends that same purpose to a workforce in which AI is part of the daily job.

At the center of that work is GGU Core, a foundational AI curriculum now included in every graduate program. Whether students study law, tax, psychology, or business, they graduate knowing how to use AI in their field.

GGU Core includes AI Applications in the Workplace, where students build working AI workflows and agents and assess how well each fits a defined use case. Its companion courses bring AI into professional writing and quantitative reasoning, with particular attention to recognizing when an AI-generated result is wrong.

AI 300 extends that commitment. It gives graduate students an entire course devoted to building and deploying AI agents for professional work.

Teaching AI 300

GGU’s (AI 300) Applied AI and Agents: From Tools to Intelligent Systems is built around the tools and agentic systems now reshaping professional work. Students work hands-on with current AI applications across text, image, data, and code, then design multi-step workflows in which model output and human judgment each have a defined role.

They build and test AI agents with current frameworks and prototype applications on low-code and no-code platforms. Running through the course are the organizational and ethical questions AI raises, from privacy to bias.

The course ends with a capstone. Each student deploys a working AI workflow or agent for a real professional use case and submits a written evaluation of how it performed.

“What I want students to leave with is the ability to build systems that are trustworthy and adaptable. That means understanding not only how to use AI, but also how to design it and test it. They should be able to anticipate where those systems might fail and when human judgment needs to take over.”

From Product to Practice

Both GGU Core and AI 300 place their weight on editorial judgment, the skill of knowing when AI output is ready for professional use and when it still needs a human hand. That same question shaped Edvisor, which Shariq and his co-founder, Rameez Mahmood, built to assist learners while leaving instructors in control of content and grading.

“Building Edvisor has made me much more interested in the moments where AI almost works. The obvious successes are easy to celebrate, but the near-misses are often more useful. They show students where context and subject knowledge still have to step in. Don’t just ask whether the system produced an answer; a student should spot the weak point, and decide if they’d actually be willing to stand behind the result.”

For GGU students, the result is a course in GGU’s applied AI curriculum taught by someone who builds AI for a living.

Shariq Shah is CEO and co-founder of Edvisor and the instructor of AI 300, a graduate course at Golden Gate University (GGU). He previously founded Tutorly.ai and studied computer science at San José State University.