Building a free, offline LLM “tutor” grounded in one university textbook — RAG, LoRA, or both? Sanity check wanted

The goal: a free, fully offline study assistant that runs on a student’s laptop and acts as a tutor for one specific textbook. Not an expert system - a patient TA that “speaks the language of the book,” answers in its framing and notation, and points the student to where to look (chapter/section/page) and how to find related material. Part of the point is also