[Past Workshop] Designing and Implementing Multi-Agent AI Systems for “Doing Better Things” in Education

Master Class Replay Link

Abstract

The primary focus of current work on Agentic AI in Education is “doing things better”: automating conventional activities in our industrial-era model of schooling. Agentic AI is used to help produce lesson plans, powerpoints, and summaries of readings – but education based on assimilative teaching-by-telling and learning-by listening does not adequately prepare students for work and life in our disruptive, chaotic, turbulent global civilization. Some of the innovations in Agentic AI should focus on “Doing Better Things” not possible before large language models: empowering collaborative design by students; personalizing learning for each individual; building students’ dispositions in resilience, tenacity, and creativity; and enhancing educators’ capacity to accomplish this instructional transformation to guided, collaborative learning-by-doing. Prof Dede will illustrate this vision with examples of current multi-agent systems designed to complement each other to enable self-directed lifelong learning ecosystems.

Bio

Chris Dede is a Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and was for 22 years its Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies.  His fields of scholarship include emerging technologies, policy, and leadership.  From 2001-2004, he was Chair of the HGSE department of Teaching and Learning.  In 2007, he was honored by Harvard University as an outstanding teacher, and in 2011 he was named a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association.  In 2023 he was named a Fellow of the Online Learning Consortium and in 2024 he was named a Scholar of the Immersive Learning Research Network.

Live Talk: 9 PM SGT (2 PM CET, 1 PM UTC), 18 March 2026 (Wednesday)