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:
- 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)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.191.pdf