Lena Agent can now read a whole course

When a student asks a question about their course at ten at night, there is usually nobody to ask. The teacher is asleep. The textbook answers a different question. What is left is a search box and whatever it returns.

Lena Agent has been able to answer that question for a while. What it could not do, until this week, was answer it from the course — it knew a great deal about photosynthesis in general and nothing about the three lessons on photosynthesis that this particular class had actually sat through, in the order their teacher chose to teach them.

What changed

The Agent now reads the course itself: the lessons, the assignments, the mark schemes and the teacher’s own notes on each. When a student asks what a question is getting at, the answer comes back in the terms their class has been using, pointing at the lesson it came from.

“It stopped telling my students things I had not taught them yet.”

That last part matters more than it sounds. A study tool that runs ahead of the syllabus is not a help; it is a second teacher with a different plan, and the student is the one who has to reconcile them.

What it will not do

It will not write a student’s coursework. It will not mark it either — marking is a judgement a teacher makes, and the Agent’s job is to make sure the student arrives at that judgement having understood the question.

It also will not read anything a teacher has not published. Draft lessons, unreleased mark schemes and anything a teacher is still writing stay out of the Agent’s reach until the class can see them too.