AI agents for education: 11 real examples

Ethan Mollick received a finished Gatsby lesson plan spreadsheet for high schoolers with no obvious errors, after delegating and walking away.

Operator returned the requested list of courses, fees and descriptions without further input, saving the author a few minutes of manual admin work.

The draft was usable but weaker than accepted NSF summaries; thinking mode helped, though it began hallucinating and misreading the sources.

Operator collected data for about 25 of 100 schools before the author stopped it; o1 then built a working chart dashboard from that data.

From one short prompt, Manus produced a publishable-style report with charts from 1,000 synthetic responses. The data is made up.

A roughly 3,000-line open-source Canvas tool built in four months. It cut a 45-minute weekly student check to a 2-minute conversation with Claude.

Three prompts produced a live interactive course website with modules, quizzes, and videos; the author also reports a 318-page ebook from further prompts.

The Agent worked for 14 minutes on the UNESCO task; the author tested it against o3-pro and ran four other work-style tasks.

It produced a review-ready draft with citations and a gaps synthesis in under ten minutes, versus half a day by hand.

Roughly two dozen decks were rebuilt into Quarto reveal.js with speaker notes and refresh checklists, and the approach was reused for two more courses.

The author reports faster literature search, Zotero notes written automatically, and accurate answers about the ATS hydrology codebase through a custom ats-mcp server.