Michael Ishola’s StudyFellow explores AI tutoring to help learners understand difficult concepts

The education technology project sets out a vision for personalised learning through artificial intelligence, guided practice and responsive feedback, with Nigeria as its starting market.

Michael Ishola, the developer behind StudyFellow, is exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) can help learners work through difficult concepts. His education technology project centres on a practical question: how can an AI tutor identify where a learner is struggling and guide them towards understanding?

StudyFellow is his response to that challenge. Its vision is an AI teaching fellow that combines structured lessons with personalised explanations, examples and feedback. The intended audience spans secondary-school, college and university students, as well as professionals working through unfamiliar subjects.

For Ishola, the motivation is captured in a short phrase: “Filling up education gaps”.

That ambition gives the project a specific focus. A learner may have access to notes, a textbook or an online explanation and still need help connecting the ideas. StudyFellow’s approach is to organise that moment into manageable steps: introduce the concept, work through an example, invite a response and offer a useful next action.

The project’s photosynthesis scenario illustrates this approach. It takes learners through the role of light in helping plants produce sugar, using an explanation and a visual sequence. The learner is then invited to reason through a different situation, connecting a change in available light to the rate of sugar production.

The question asks for both a prediction and an explanation. This reflects a central design intention: making a learner’s reasoning visible enough to identify where further help may be useful. A correct answer without an explanation can leave important uncertainty about what the learner has understood.

Within that vision, AI would help interpret a learner’s explanation, identify possible misconceptions and select a useful follow-up. Adaptive teaching could mean offering a simpler example, revisiting an earlier idea or asking a clarifying question before moving forward. The intention is to make the teaching sequence responsive to the learner’s reasoning.

The planned role of generative AI includes helping shape explanations and practice around the learner’s topic and questions, with source references and checks on instructional accuracy. StudyFellow also treats continuity as part of the experience: a learner who pauses should have a clear route back to the work and an understandable next step.

For Nigerian investors and innovation founders, StudyFellow offers a focused application of AI in education to examine: tutoring organised around a learner’s specific point of difficulty. Its value proposition rests on the quality of that teaching interaction and the learner’s ability to apply an idea after working through it.

The project’s intended market direction begins in Nigeria, with a broader African ambition. Its design priorities include clear language, readable layouts on phones and lessons that can communicate meaning through text and diagrams. These priorities place attention on how someone can actually participate in a session, alongside what the session teaches.

StudyFellow’s intended impact is to help learners approach difficult material with greater understanding and a clearer sense of how to continue. The distinction between an engaging explanation and demonstrated understanding matters: meaningful evidence would include learners explaining their reasoning and applying a concept in an unfamiliar example.

The project also creates a basis for conversations with educators and learning institutions about where focused teaching support could fit into existing study routines. For founders, it offers a case for examining how AI tutoring and thoughtful product design could support an individual learning interaction. For investors, the relevant questions include learner demand, instructional quality, sustained use and a workable path to distribution.

Through StudyFellow, Ishola is putting a defined educational ambition into product form: using AI-assisted learning to help a learner move from a confusing idea towards an explanation they can use. “Filling up education gaps” gives that work its direction; the learning experience is where the ambition takes shape.