Instructional Agents: Reducing Teaching Faculty Workload through Multi-Agent Instructional Design

Huaiyuan Yao, Wanpeng Xu, Justin Turnau, Nadia Kellam, Hua Wei


Abstract
Preparing high-quality instructional materials remains a labor-intensive process that often requires extensive coordination among teaching faculty, instructional designers, and teaching assistants. In this work, we present Instructional Agents, a multi-agent large language model (LLM) framework designed to automate end-to-end course material generation, including syllabus creation, lecture scripts, LaTeX-based slides, and assessments. Unlike existing AI-assisted educational tools that focus on isolated tasks, Instructional Agents simulates role-based collaboration among educational agents to produce cohesive and pedagogically aligned content. The system operates in four modes: Autonomous, Catalog-Guided, Feedback-Guided, and Full Co-Pilot mode, enabling flexible control over the degree of human involvement. We evaluate Instructional Agents across five university-level computer science courses and show that it produces high-quality instructional materials while significantly reducing development time and human workload. By supporting institutions with limited instructional design capacity, Instructional Agents provides a scalable and cost-effective framework to democratize access to high-quality education, particularly in underserved or resource-constrained settings.
Anthology ID:
2026.eacl-long.191
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, Lluís Marquez
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4087–4109
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.191/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Huaiyuan Yao, Wanpeng Xu, Justin Turnau, Nadia Kellam, and Hua Wei. 2026. Instructional Agents: Reducing Teaching Faculty Workload through Multi-Agent Instructional Design. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4087–4109, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Instructional Agents: Reducing Teaching Faculty Workload through Multi-Agent Instructional Design (Yao et al., EACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.191.pdf