Teaching Assistant: Available Immediately

Earlier this year, Jetri ran a survey to understand some of the key challenges faculty members from STEM and non-STEM disciplines in higher education institutions (HEI) in India face on a daily basis. These findings were eventually put together as the Faculty WorkLife 2025. 

Some of the loudest complaints were about task overload. Too much administrative work, too many assessments to check, too little time for brainstorming, innovation and planning lessons that leave a mark on students.

This shouldn’t be the case, especially in the age of AI tools and new-age tech, which can help eliminate these irritants quickly and painlessly. You don’t need to be highly tech-literate or savvy to be able to master these tools. All you need is a learning mindset and a willingness to pivot!

We picked three simple and highly useful productivity tools for faculty in HEIs that can reduce administrative burden, allowing more time for teaching and innovation in the classroom. Each tool has information on pricing, practical use cases, and accessibility. Some of these tools are free, others work on a freemium mode—try any one or more, choose one that fits your needs the best, and get started today!

Make AI you Personal Assistant: Notion

Let’s start with a basic but immensely useful tool. Every second self-proclaimed productivity guru on YouTube swears by Notion as their one-stop life management system—and let me reassure you, it’s not all hype.

What’s in it for you? 

As educators, you can turn Notion into a flexible all-in-one digital workspace that combines note-taking, task management, collaboration and database functions. You can plan lessons by creating linked pages for each unit, store readings, videos and assignments in a central hub while also building databases of student information schedules and assessments that can be sorted, filtered and shared with colleagues or students depending on need. 

Notion also supports real time collaboration and can act as a platform for group projects, class wikis or collaborative research, where students contribute content directly to shared pages. It can give them a sense of ownership and responsibility over the learning process and make it easier for teachers to track progress and participation. 

Ready to Go

Notion is highly customizable. So you can design dashboards that display your weekly teaching schedule, upcoming grading tasks, and important reminders alongside resources like rubrics or curriculum maps. This way, you can always have a bird’s-eye view of your responsibilities and for online or hybrid learning environments. Notion also provides dozens of free templates to help educators streamline their job. Here are a few that you can start with and make them your own: Lesson Plan Organizer, Course Notes Database, and Academic Content Planner. Notion is also integrated with AI, which can help you build your own system seamlessly.

In a nutshell

• Pricing: Free personal plan; Plus Plan is free for students and educators (with a school email)
• Use Cases: Centralizes notes, course materials, collaborative projects, lesson planning, and administrative tracking. Faculties can organize syllabi, manage research tasks, and collaborate on institutional documents in real time.
• Accessibility: Available as a web app, desktop app, web plug-in and mobile app (iOS and Android). Notion supports screen readers and keyboard navigation, and offers dark mode.

Make AI Your Research Assistant: ChatGPT

ChatGPT is one of the easiest chatbots out there for general use. Enter a prompt, get an output, and voilà, life is suddenly much easier. Your students are most likely trying it out all the time. But you can have an edge over them by understanding prompt engineering deeper. Check out this handy prompt pack to get started. In the best-case scenario, you can turn ChatGPT into your personalized teaching assistant.

What’s in it for you?

ChatGPT can streamline lesson planning by generating lecture outlines, sample activities, quiz questions, rubrics, and even differentiated materials for students at varying skill levels. It can help in drafting professional emails, creating assessment feedback, and simplifying complex topics into more accessible language for learners who may struggle.

Where ChatGPT becomes even more powerful is through the creation of personalised GPTs, which are custom AI assistants that educators can design and tailor to their specific teaching context. For instance, a biology professor could create a GPT that is fine-tuned to their course syllabus, key readings, and lab instructions, enabling students to ask questions and receive consistent, context-aware explanations. 

For research and academic tasks, you can train a personalised GPT on your chosen body of literature, which can then act as a literature review assistant by summarizing papers, finding potential research gaps, or formatting citations in the correct academic style. As with all GPTs, don’t put your faith in the machine unconditionally. Always verify and cross-check the outcome.

Ready to Go

The process of creating your own GPT is easy and intuitive. You can do it in a few hours. Here is a bird’s-eye view of some of the most useful GPTs for faculty members. Once you register on the OpenAI Academy, you will also be able to access free resources that give you hands-on insights into building your own GPT.

In a nutshell

• Pricing: Free basic plan; paid upgrades for more advanced use.
• Use Cases: Expands snippets for frequently used text, such as grading comments, responses to common queries, or email replies. Saves hours on repetitive communication and document handling.
• Accessibility: Works as a Chrome extension. Insert snippets anywhere you can type in Chrome, supporting a variety of web-based higher ed platforms.

Make AI Your Teaching Assistant: Socrative

Tired of the same old style of delivering lectures? Socrative can make teaching fun for you as well as for your students. It’s an interactive platform where you can design and deliver quizzes, polls, and exit tickets in real time, making classes more engaging and student-centered. You can check students’ understanding during lessons, encourage participation, and change your teaching strategies, based on immediate feedback.

What’s in it for you?

Socrative is excellent for building formative assessment. You can quickly create multiple-choice, true/false, or short-answer questions that allow you to check for comprehension instantly. This helps identify learning gaps, misconceptions, and areas where students need more clarification. By receiving real-time analytics, you can tailor discussions, revisit complex concepts, or adjust the pacing of lectures to better meet learners’ needs.

Socrative has gamified features that fosters active learning, collaboration, and can even add a competitive edge to class participation. This increases motivation, encourages peer learning, and makes large lectures more interactive. What’s more, the anonymity of responses can help introverted or nervous students respond without any fear of judgment, leading to more inclusive classroom engagement.

Ready to Go

Socrative saves time for faculty by automating grading and providing instant reports on student performance. The reports can be exported for record-keeping, reflection, or continuous course improvement. It also supports flexible teaching modes, whether in-person, hybrid, or fully online, making it a versatile tool. You can try out a pilot version at a discounted price before you decide to buy the full version.

In a nutshell

• Pricing: Free basic plan (up to 50 students per room); paid pro plans allow larger class sizes, multiple rooms, and advanced reporting features.
• Use Cases: Supports real-time formative assessment through quizzes, polls, and exit tickets. Helps faculty monitor student understanding, encourages participation, and adapts lessons based on immediate feedback.
• Accessibility: Cloud-based and device-agnostic. Students can access Socrative on laptops, tablets, or smartphones via browser or free mobile app, while faculty can manage activities from any web-enabled device, making it compatible with diverse teaching environments (in-person, hybrid, or online).