Pima Community College Partners with LearnWise AI to Embed Support Inside Brightspace

Background

Pima Community College (PCC) is a large, multi-campus community college serving a high-volume and highly diverse student population across Southern Arizona. Its learners include adult students, dual enrollment high school students, and a significant number of fully online students. 30% of credit students were exclusively online in the 2025 academic year, with roughly half of PCC’s spring and fall students partially online, yet even face-to-face students rely heavily on the Learning Management System (LMS).

With an unduplicated headcount of 40,642 in the 2024–2025 academic year, PCC operates at a significant scale. In practice, Brightspace is not simply a delivery tool for online courses. It is the backbone of the learner experience. Syllabi live there. Grades are checked there. Faculty communication happens there. Across modalities, the LMS is the center of teaching and learning.

In early 2026, PCC entered into a partnership to deploy Lumi Chat powered by LearnWise inside Brightspace, alongside a planned integration with TeamDynamix (TDX). The goal is clear: reduce friction in the most important digital space students inhabit and align support with the rhythm of how learners actually work.

Context & Challenge

PCC’s complexity comes from scale combined with rapid technological change.

Faculty are not monolithic: some prefer minimal technology, while others thrive using existing systems. The LMS team supports that full spectrum while maintaining clarity and consistency for students.

At the same time, student expectations around digital experience are evolving: many learners work full-time jobs, support families, and log into Brightspace late at night. Their time is scarce, and those late hours are often when institutional staff are least available.

At PCC, a way to bridge the gap was considering resources, time and availability. Already maintaining knowledge bases with accurate information, and building out FAQ sections, the issue was not information availability, but accessibility in context. For PCC, students and faculty frequently struggle to articulate the problem they are experiencing. They may not know which system is responsible or what terminology to use. The friction is not always technical, but cognitive.

For PCC, the goal is not automation for its own sake, but to deliver responsive support in alignment with the lived reality of learners and faculty.

The Partnership with LearnWise AI

Partnering with Brightspace to deliver AI solutions reduced institutional risk and aligned with existing infrastructure. More importantly, Lumi Chat reflects how conversational technology has evolved. It is natural, capable, and straightforward to deploy inside the LMS environment.

Governance was also central to the decision. Faculty and students already navigate multiple systems - every additional interface introduces training demands and cognitive load. By embedding Lumi Chat directly within Brightspace, PCC preserves interface consistency and avoids fragmentation.

As Tony Sovak, LMS & eLearning Quality Director, describes: 

“I want as much as possible everything to exist in the same spot for our learners and our users. And that includes help. If users are going to turn to AI for help, I would rather that interaction happen inside a system aligned with our values, our governance, and our support structures."

For PCC, support should not require leaving the learning environment. When users encounter friction, asking them to navigate to separate systems such as knowledge bases, ticket portals, or institutional sites adds complexity at the exact moment they need clarity.

With Lumi Chat, support becomes embedded in the lived learning experience. A user can ask for help in context, receive an immediate answer when possible, or have a ticket created on their behalf without needing to understand internal systems. From the user perspective, help is simply in motion.

Reimagining Ticket Intake with TeamDynamix Integration

PCC sees Lumi Chat as a solution with the potential to function as a unified conversational intake layer within the institution’s enterprise help desk model.

Today, multiple service desks operate across the college using TeamDynamix. However, that entry point does not live inside the LMS and does not carry Brightspace-specific context.

Embedding AI-mediated support directly within Brightspace allows PCC to:

• Centralize intake at the point of friction
• Route requests intelligently across services
• Capture context during the conversation before escalation
• Improve ticket quality and reduce back-and-forth
• Maintain full service tracking and continuity

Ticketing systems are essential for tracking service and identifying trends. Yet users often resist them:

“In the whole history of IT departments we’ve always had these tickets because we have to track service. But end users always say the same thing, ‘I hate tickets.’” – Tony Sovak, LMS & eLearning Quality Director

By gathering required details conversationally and creating structured tickets when necessary, PCC aims to preserve accountability while reducing friction.

Operational Focus: Immediate Priorities

In the near term, PCC is focused on two operational pain points:

1. Improving Ticket Intake Quality

Conversational intake can collect essential information in real time. This reduces incomplete submissions, decreases back-and-forth communication, and improves triage efficiency for support teams.

2. Surge Management

When known issues occur, help desks can quickly become overwhelmed with repetitive requests. Updating Lumi Chat with current information or temporary workarounds allows the institution to manage volume proactively and protect staff bandwidth.

"This isn’t about replacing human support; it’s about strengthening it through better alignment between technology and service." – Tony Sovak, LMS & eLearning Quality Director

Measuring Success and Continuous Improvement

Key intended outcomes include:

• Reduction in repetitive LMS-related tickets
• Faster time-to-resolution for common issues
• Improved user satisfaction with support access
• Increased faculty confidence in experimenting with LMS features
• Reduced friction that contributes to student disengagement

From a systems perspective, PCC is particularly interested in visibility into patterns of friction. While engagement data and ticket volume are available, there is a missing layer between those metrics and lived user experience.

Even at a pattern level, insights into when help is requested and in what categories can inform:

• Documentation improvements
• Onboarding refinements
• Navigation adjustments
• Proactive rather than reactive service improvements

Implementing AI in Education: Pima Community College’s Long-Term Vision

Longer term, PCC sees AI-powered support contributing to persistence, confidence, and modernization of service delivery.

The LMS is one of the most impactful digital environments at the institution. When friction occurs there, it can escalate into disengagement. Plain-language, in-context support reduces the likelihood that small technical barriers become larger obstacles.

For faculty, a strong support infrastructure reduces cognitive load and increases confidence to experiment pedagogically. It creates conditions where innovation feels supported rather than risky.

More broadly, PCC recognizes that AI is already part of how students and staff interact with technology. The question is not whether AI will enter institutional ecosystems. It already has.

The institutional priority is to shape that experience intentionally within PCC’s own governance structures, values, and service frameworks. If users are going to turn to AI for help, PCC prefers that interaction to occur inside a supported, accountable environment aligned with institutional standards.

For PCC, this pilot represents responsible exploration. It is proportionate in scope, collaborative in nature, and aligned with a long-term vision of reducing friction inside the most critical digital space learners use every day.

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