Coursemojo is an education technology company using AI to empower both teachers and students in the classroom. For students, an AI teaching assistant Mojo delivers “conversational worksheets” that provide hints, scaffolding, and context to guide them toward answers without giving solutions away or going off-topic. For teachers, Mojo transforms existing assignments into interactive, curriculum-aligned activities that enable real-time insights that better support student learning.

With the help of Vellum, Coursemojo was able to save over 6+ months of engineering time while rapidly scaling from serving ~7,000 students last year to 60,000+ students and growing today.

We sat down with Jamie, CTO at Coursemojo, to hear how their team uses Vellum to build, evaluate, and deploy Mojo with particular assurance that material is accurate, information dense, and secure from being derailed.

The Challenge: Build or Buy?

Coursemojo’s engineering team began building an internal solution to power and iterate on Mojo, but as complexity grew, the bottlenecks became clear:

• Engineering drain: Most of developers' time would be spent iterating and maintaining infrastructure instead of improving the student and teacher experience.
• No evaluations & insights: Their solution lacked an evaluation system to test and validate prompt/workflow updates before production.
• Non-technical lockout: Educators and content teams had no way to create or refine workflows without heavy engineering support.

When evaluating whether to continue building in house or build with Vellum, the answer was clear.

When we saw Vellum, we realized we could turn this on today and essentially leapfrog six months of software development or more — Jamie Forrest, CTO, Coursemojo

TLDR;

Goal: Building GenAI solutions fast and reliably

Coursemojo needed a platform that enabled building and collaborative iteration on Mojo, without creating overhead for engineers. This is what they set out to do on Vellum:

• Build & orchestrate AI workflows that could generate curriculum-aligned activities and teacher insights, with guardrails to prevent students from taking the AI off-topic or into inappropriate territory.
• Evaluate prompts, workflows, and content changes before production to catch regressions and handle edge cases.
• Reliably deploy updates and new workflows at scale without introducing regressions or compromising quality.
• Deploy updates instantly without requiring engineering redeploys or downtime.
• Enable cross-team collaboration so technical and non-technical contributors could work within the same AI workflow environment.

The Solution

Several teams at Coursemojo work within Vellum to build, test, and refine AI workflows, with each contributing in different ways to keep iteration fast and effective.

• Transformation team: Specialists who bridge educators and engineers by handling prompt engineering, workflow creation, and bulk updates.
• QA team: A team that uses Vellum’s evaluation tools to test prompt changes, catch regressions, and address edge cases before deployment.
• Engineering team: Provides orchestration support and debugging when needed, while staying out of daily workflow iteration.

Here are the solutions that enabled the transformation team to use Vellum for rapid iteration in turning curriculum materials into AI workflows.

1/ Orchestrate AI workflows visually

Vellum’s visual environment lets the team build complex AI workflows, run them in parallel, and merge outputs all without backend coding. This made it possible to easily build and orchestrate multi-step AI solutions for both students and teachers, complete with guardrails to keep interactions on-topic and age-appropriate.

When I first saw Vellum, it was clear that it was exactly what we were building, only much further ahead and ready to use today.
- Jamie

2/ Evaluation tooling to catch regressions and edge cases

Before Vellum, any time the team wanted to adjust a prompt, they had no reliable way of knowing how the change would affect the student experience. Even small tweaks introduced risk in breaking the flow of activities.

Vellum’s evaluation and observability tools gave Coursemojo a structured way to test prompt changes, compare outputs, and identify regressions or problematic edge cases before deployment.

If we ever wanted to change anything , we had zero insight into how that would affect the experience…so, that was one of the things Vellum solved for us. We got evals out of the box.

3/ Instant, code-free prompt deployment

By managing prompts directly in Vellum, updates can be pushed live without a full engineering redeploy. This eliminates a major iteration bottleneck and frees developers to focus on core product improvements.

All the extra engineering overhead, coming from time spent tweaking workflows, is gone from using Vellum.
- Jamie

4/ Eliminate engineering bottlenecks

With Vellum’s drag-and-drop interface, non-technical staff now own workflow creation and iteration. Engineers step in only for complex debugging, significantly accelerating iteration speed.

Vellum is now empowering our non-technical users to build these workflows themselves, it’s no longer an engineering task to build and manage our workflows. As a result we saved 6+ months of engineering time so far. - Jamie

The Results

With Vellum, Coursemojo was able to push beyond AI pilots and has a reliable AI solution in production. With Vellum’s help they have achieved amazing progress: 

• 6+ months of engineering time saved by relying on Vellum’s infra instead of building in-house
• 10x growth in students served (7,000 → 60,000) without expanding engineering team
• 2,000+ new activities launched for the new school year
• 8% higher end-of-year exam scores for students using Coursemojo vs. non-users (WSMV4)

These results show how Vellum gave Coursemojo the speed, scale, and flexibility to deliver thousands of safe, curriculum-aligned AI activities without expanding headcount or development overhead.

Last year, we served around 7,000 students, and this year we're at 60,000 students and growing. Vellum is supporting the 10x growth in curricula.
- Jamie

Eliminate engineering bottlenecks with Vellum

Vellum is proud to support Coursemojo in transforming classrooms nationwide by providing an all in one platform that eliminates engineering overhead and empowers teams to build, test, and deploy AI powered activities at scale.

If you want to give your teams the ability to iterate faster, maintain quality, and collaborate seamlessly on AI features, we can help.

Book a demo with us and discover how Vellum’s suite of products can help you develop, evaluate, and continuously improve the AI capabilities that power your product.