Teaching Copilot Agent
Purpose: The Teaching Copilot Agent is designed to save faculty time and enhance teaching efficiency on a weekly basis. It acts as a personal assistant for instructors, handling content prep, summarizing lectures, generating student engagement material, and more – so faculty can focus on teaching and mentorship.
Core Capabilities
Content Creation Assistance
Drafts lecture slides and handouts from faculty-provided outlines or notes. Instructors can give a rough outline or key points, and the agent will generate a polished slide deck or handout document complete with illustrations or examples (which the instructor can then tweak). It can also transcribe and summarize recorded lectures, turning them into concise notes or even a bank of quiz questions for students to review.
Discussion and Case Materials
Generates engaging discussion prompts and short case scenarios (caselets) related to the week’s topic to spark classroom or forum discussions. It ensures these prompts align with the learning outcomes. For assignments and exams, the agent provides rubric-aligned feedback snippets that faculty can use when grading – ensuring consistency and saving time writing repetitive comments.
Administrative Timesavers
Manages routine teaching logistics. For example, it can coordinate office hours by analyzing calendars and suggesting available slots to students. It can also draft responses to common student emails (like requests for deadline extensions or assignment clarifications) by pulling context from the course syllabus and past announcements, letting faculty just review and send.
Integrations & Data
Works with the Learning Management System (LMS) to pull assignment details, grades, and forum posts as needed. Integrates with video recording platforms to access lecture recordings for transcription. Accesses faculty calendars and email (with permission) to schedule meetings and draft replies. All content (slides, summaries, feedback) is saved back to the LMS or faculty repository for easy access by students and staff.
Guardrails
The agent does not autonomously send communications or grades – faculty review is required for all drafts (emails, feedback, etc.) before students see them. It follows institutional tone and policy guidelines (e.g., it won’t grant extensions or make policy exceptions without instructor input). Bias checks are in place for content generation (to avoid any inappropriate or one-sided material in slides or cases). Essentially, the faculty member remains the final authority; the Copilot just handles the heavy lifting of preparation.
Pilot KPIs
In pilot implementations, faculty members saved an estimated 16–24 hours per month on teaching prep and admin tasks. Other KPIs include faster feedback turnaround time (with the agent helping prepare draft comments, grading could be completed 20–30% sooner on average) and high faculty satisfaction – professors report less burnout and more time available for student interaction and research.