StudyBuddy User Guide

StudyBuddy is a study companion for higher-education students. It brings your modules, documents, calendar, notes, and AI study tools into one place — and tracks how far you've gotten through each module's syllabus automatically.

Creating an account

1. Click Sign Up on the landing page.
2. Enter your email, first and last name, phone (optional), institution, and a password (at least 8 characters).
3. After signing up you'll land on your Dashboard. New accounts default to the student role.

Navigation

On desktop, a fixed sidebar on the left gives you access to everything:

• Dashboard — your home overview
• Programs — browse and enroll in programmes
• My Modules — your enrolled modules
• Calendar & Tasks — events and deadlines
• Assessments — AI-generated quizzes
• AI Document Chat — chat with your uploaded files
• AI Tutor — Socratic study sessions
• Study — a focused study surface
• Help — this page

Admins also see an Admin link for managing the module catalog and users.

The Dashboard home page gives you a quick snapshot of your academic life. It's organized into two columns on large screens:

Before you can track progress or study, you need to be enrolled in at least one module. StudyBuddy organizes modules into programmes offered by institutions.

Enrolling in a programme

1. Go to Programs in the sidebar.
2. Pick an institution from the list.
3. Browse the programmes offered and click Enroll on the one you're studying.
4. You'll be enrolled in every module in that programme. The lowest-numbered semester becomes your current modules; later semesters are marked upcoming.

Unenrolling from a module

On the My Modules page, each module card has an × icon in the corner. Click it to unenroll from that module. Your study history and progress are preserved — if you re-enroll later, everything comes back.

The My Modules page lists everything you're enrolled in, grouped by semester. Each card shows the module icon, name, lecturer, credits, syllabus progress percentage, lesson count, and pending events.

A sidebar on the left shows your enrolled programme info and your overall stats (enrolled count, current count, total credits, average progress).

Module detail page

Click any module card to open its detail page, which has seven tabs:

The right sidebar has a module-scoped AI chat for quick questions, plus a list of upcoming deadlines for that module.

Editing a module (lecturers & admins)

If you have the lecturer or admin role, an Edit Module link appears on the module detail page. This lets you edit the module's name, lecturer, credits, semester, description, icon, and color, and add/edit/delete lessons in the syllabus. See the Admin & Lecturer Tools section for details.

The Documents page is where you upload your study materials — lecture slides, readings, past papers, notes — and chat with the AI about them.

Uploading documents

• Click Upload and select a file (or drag it onto the dialog).
• Supported types: PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Markdown, plain text. Max size: 50 MB.
• Files are deduplicated by content hash — uploading the same file twice just links it to another module without re-processing.
• After upload, the file is queued for text extraction, chunking, and embedding so the AI can search it. You'll see a Processing badge until it's ready.

Viewing a document

Click any document to open the viewer. The left pane shows the document (PDF embedded, Office via Microsoft viewer, text/markdown rendered). The right pane is an AI chat sidebar. On mobile, the chat is a floating button that opens a slide-in drawer.

Chatting with a document

Ask the AI anything about the document — summaries, explanations, key concepts. The AI searches the document's text chunks using semantic similarity and bases its answer on what it finds. If the answer isn't in the document, it'll tell you rather than make things up.

You can also quote a specific passage from the document and ask about it — select text, and the quote is included with your question so the AI focuses on that section.

Document notes

The Notes tab next to the document viewer lets you take rich-text notes while you read. You can create multiple notes per document, rename them, and format them with the full editor (see the Notes section). Notes autosave and can be restructured by AI.

The AI Assistant is a general-purpose chat that knows about your academic life. It can answer questions, search your documents, reference your syllabus, and help with any module.

What it knows

When you ask a question, the assistant automatically pulls in relevant context:

• Your enrolled modules and their full syllabus (lessons, outcomes, resources).
• Your upcoming calendar events and deadlines.
• Your past assessment results and feedback.
• Your uploaded documents — it runs semantic search over your document chunks when your question looks academic.
• Your personal notes, when they share keywords with your question.

Using the assistant

1. Open AI Assistant from the sidebar.
2. Optionally pick a module and lesson from the dropdowns to scope the conversation.
3. Type your question and press Enter. Responses stream in real-time.
4. Use the quick-start chips for common tasks: Explain a concept, Help me structure my assignment, Create a study schedule, Quiz me on a topic.

The AI Tutor is a Socratic tutor scoped to one module at a time. Instead of just giving you answers, it explains a concept, then asks you a question to test your understanding, and marks your answer out of 100.

How a tutoring session works

1. Open AI Tutor from the sidebar.
2. Pick an enrolled module (grouped by semester) and click Start tutoring.
3. Ask for an explanation of a concept, or the tutor will ask you a question after explaining.
4. Type your answer. The tutor marks it and gives feedback.
5. The tutor then asks a follow-up question to deepen your understanding.

What the tutor sees

A panel on the right shows the module's code, learning outcomes, lesson list, and uploaded study materials. The tutor uses all of this — plus semantic search over your documents for that module — to give targeted, syllabus-aligned help.

Past tutoring sessions are listed in the sidebar and can be continued or deleted.

The Assessments page lets you generate short quizzes on any module, learning outcome, or specific lesson, then take them and get instant AI marking.

Creating an assessment

1. Go to Assessments and click New Assessment.
2. Select a module from your enrolled modules.
3. Choose a topic: All outcomes & lessons, a specific learning outcome, or a specific lesson.
4. Set the number of questions (1–10) using the slider.
5. Click Start Assessment. The AI generates short-answer questions based on the module's syllabus and learning outcomes.

Taking and marking

The assessment page has a question navigator on the left and the active question on the right. For each question you can:

• Type your answer in the editor.
• Save a draft, or Submit & Mark to get instant AI feedback.
• See a score out of 100, a Pass/Needs work badge (pass = 50%+), and AI feedback.
• View the model answer (collapsible).
• Take per-question notes or chat with the AI about that specific question.
• Edit and re-mark any answer after seeing feedback.

Scoring and lesson coverage

The overall assessment score is the average of all marked questions. If the assessment was scoped to a specific lesson and you score 60% or higher, that lesson is automatically marked as covered in your syllabus progress — regardless of how much time you've spent on it.

StudyBuddy has a built-in rich-text note editor (powered by Tiptap) that appears in two places: inside the document viewer and on each assessment question.

What you can do

• Format text: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, inline code, code blocks with syntax highlighting.
• Structure: headings (H1–H3), bullet lists, numbered lists, blockquotes.
• Align text: left, center, right, justify.
• Add hyperlinks (Ctrl+K).
• Autosave — document notes autosave after ~60 seconds of inactivity; assessment notes after ~4 seconds. You can also press Ctrl+S or click Save manually.

Document notes

Each document can have multiple notes. Create, rename, and delete them from the notes sidebar. Notes are tied to the document's module, so the AI Assistant can pull them into context when you ask a related question.

Structure with AI

In document notes, a Structure with AI button sends your note to the AI, which reorganizes your raw notes into clean Markdown with headings, lists, and example callouts — appended below your original text so you can compare. Undo with Ctrl+Z if you don't like the result.

StudyBuddy has a built-in calendar for tracking lectures, assignments, study sessions, and deadlines. Everything is personal to you — no shared calendars.

Calendar view

• Switch between Month and Week views.
• Navigate with previous/next buttons or jump to today.
• Click Add Event in the header, or hover over a day cell and click the + to add an event on that date.
• An upcoming events sidebar shows the next 6 events in the visible range.

Event types

Creating an event

Events have a title, type, start and end time (or all-day), optional module link, description, and location. End time must be after the start time.

Tasks page

The Tasks page is a flat list of all your events grouped by urgency, with a completion checkbox next to each. It's a quick way to see everything you need to do and tick things off.

StudyBuddy automatically tracks your study time and uses it to calculate how far you've progressed through each module's syllabus. You don't need to start or stop anything manually — it happens in the background.

The four study surfaces

A study session starts automatically whenever you use any of these four places:

When you open one of these and pick a module (and ideally a specific lesson), StudyBuddy starts a session and shows a small timer. Keep working — the timer keeps counting.

Auto-close and the 2-hour rule

If you leave the tab open but stop interacting for more than two hours, StudyBuddy assumes you've moved on and wraps up the session for you. It writes a short AI recap of what you covered, and the time already logged still counts. If you switch to a different topic, the old session is closed the same way before the new one starts.

You can also close a session manually with the End session button and add your own closing remarks.

How a lesson becomes "Covered"

Each lesson moves through three states: Not started → In progress → Covered. A lesson becomes "Covered" automatically when either:

• You've spent enough time on it — the threshold depends on the lesson type:

• You've passed an assessment — score 60% or higher on a quiz scoped to that lesson, and it's covered immediately.

Marking a lesson yourself

You can click the status marker on any lesson row (in the module's Content tab) to cycle it between Not started / In progress / Covered. Manually-marked lessons are labeled "manual", and your module's progress card shows how many covered lessons were set manually vs. by actual study activity.

"Needs review" tags

If you covered a lesson more than two months ago and haven't touched it since, a "needs review" tag appears. Nothing gets un-covered — it's just a nudge to refresh material you covered early in the term.

Reading your progress

On your Dashboard and My Modules, each module card shows a single "Syllabus Progress" percentage. This is covered lessons ÷ total active lessons, rounded to the nearest whole number. The module's Overview tab breaks this down further with covered/in-progress/not-started counts, total minutes, and manual-vs-auto and needs-review counts.

If you have the admin or lecturer role, you can manage the module catalog and syllabus content. Admins can additionally manage user roles.

Module catalog (Admin panel)

The Admin page (visible only to admins in the sidebar) has two sections:

• Module Catalog — a table of all modules with add, edit, and delete actions. Each module has a code (unique), name, programme, semester, credits, lecturer, description, icon, and color.
• Users — a list of all users with a role selector (student / lecturer / admin). Admins cannot demote themselves.

Editing a module's syllabus

From any module's detail page, lecturers and admins can click Edit Module to:

• Edit the module's name, lecturer, credits, semester, description, icon, color.
• Add, edit, reorder, and delete lessons. Each lesson has a unit, type (kind), title, description, objectives, link URL, availability date, and graded flag.
• Edit the module's learning outcomes, resources, and assessment info.

Lesson types

Setting the correct lesson type matters — it determines how much study time a student needs before the lesson is automatically covered:

Mobile navigation

StudyBuddy is fully responsive. On mobile devices:

• The desktop sidebar collapses into a slide-out drawer, opened via the hamburger icon in the top bar.
• A bottom navigation bar appears with 5 quick destinations: Dashboard, Calendar, Study, Assessments, and AI Chat.
• PDFs render as canvas pages (via react-pdf) instead of an embedded iframe, for better touch performance.
• The AI chat sidebar on documents becomes a floating button that opens a drawer.

Dark & light theme

StudyBuddy defaults to dark mode. Toggle between dark and light using the sun/moon icon in the top navigation bar (landing pages) or the top bar (dashboard). Your preference is saved in your browser and applied on every visit.