"Bespoke Bots": Diverse Instructor Needs for Customizing Generative AI Classroom Chatbots

Instructors are increasingly experimenting with AI chatbots for classroom support. To investigate how instructors adapt chatbots to their own contexts, we first analyzed existing resources that provide prompts for educational purposes. We identified ten common categories of customization, such as persona, guardrails, and personalization. We then conducted interviews with ten university STEM instructors and asked them to card-sort the categories into priorities. We found that instructors consistently prioritized the ability to customize chatbot behavior to align with course materials and pedagogical strategies and de-prioritized customizing persona/tone. However, their prioritization of other categories varied significantly by course size, discipline, and teaching style, even across courses taught by the same individual, highlighting that no single design can meet all contexts. These findings suggest that modular AI chatbots may provide a promising path forward. We offer design implications for educational developers building the next generation of customizable classroom AI systems.