Modularizing Educational LLM-Agency for Fostering Responsible Learning Assistance
Authors: Julius Gabelmann, Felix Jahn, Kevin Baum, Sophie van Rossum, Emely Wuenscher, Timo P. Gros, Verena Wolf
Organizations: 1German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) · 2Saarland Informatics Campus, Germany · Center for European Research in Trusted AI (CERTAIN)
The widespread adoption of AI chatbots in education will drastically change learning, making responsible deployment a critical concern. While large language models (LLMs) might have access to sources discussing insights from educational sciences, they are not particularly inclined to adhere to pedagogical concepts, risking negative effects on the learning process, such as a loss of transfer capabilities, critical thinking, or creativity. In this paper, we introduce an agentic AI chatbot architecture assisting students with exercise solving, specifically designed to contribute to more responsible AI use in education. We base our conceptual development on the identification of several desiderata for responsible LLM-based educational systems, argue for the structural shortcomings inherent in monolithic, out-of-the-box solutions, and instead suggest modularizing the agentic architecture. We propose specific modules for different stages of exercise solving, enabling incorporation of targeted pedagogical advice, guiding students through the learning process in a more controllable, transparent, and overseeable manner.
This demo paper describes the development of the AI Teaching & Learning Assistant, a modular Moodle plugin that leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to deliver high-quality, hallucination-free education. The system employs a dual-centric design, providing students with interactive, Socratic-based tutoring and educators with a "human-in-the-loop" workspace for supervised content generation. By grounding Large Language Model (LLM) responses in teacher-provided materials, the assistant addresses the risks of misinformation while encouraging deep conceptual mastery. Evaluation via the Ragas (LLM-as-a-Judge) framework and a preliminary user study confirms its effectiveness, achieving faithfulness scores up to 0.97 and a 4.00/5.00 recommendation rate.
Anna Ostrowska, Michał Kukla, Gabriela Majstrak +4
Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents a paradigm shift from reactive systems to proactive, autonomous decision making frameworks. Existing AI-based educational systems remain fragmented and lack multi-level integration across stakeholders. This paper proposes the Agentic Unified Student Support System (AUSS), a novel multi-agent architecture integrating student-level personalization, educator-level automation, and institutional-level intelligence. The framework leverages Large Language Models (LLMs), reinforcement learning, predictive analytics, and rule-based reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate improvements in recommendation accuracy (92.4%), grading efficiency (94.1%), and dropout prediction (F1-score: 89.5%). The proposed system enables scalable, adaptive, and intelligent educational ecosystems.
The advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), and in particular Large Language Models (LLMs), is reshaping educational practice, while intensifying ethical debate about its adoption. To date, the dominant paradigm remains cloud-based and text-only chatbot: a centralized service that offers limited pedagogical control, weak transparency over knowledge sources, and non-trivial risks for privacy and regulatory compliance. This model also presumes continuous connectivity and recurring API costs, creating structural barriers for many institutions, reinforcing existing digital divides. At the same time, educational interaction with LLM can benefit from multimodal cues and embodied presence, requiring interfaces that move beyond text-only tutoring. In this work, we propose ELEVATE (Efficient LLM Education with Virtual Avatar Teaching Engine), a framework to develop efficient GenAI-driven avatar tutors governed by epistemic infrastructures. ELEVATE integrates LLM-driven dialogue with embodied 3D avatars for multimodal interaction and adopts a local-first execution model enabling deployment on consumer-grade hardware. The framework formalizes a three-stratum design that separates (i) a student-facing virtual avatar interaction layer, (ii) a local GenAI execution and multimodal synthesis core, and (iii) a teacher-facing governance layer. We implemented and evaluated a working prototype deployed in a real-world educational curriculum. The system runs on standard PCs and smartphones, and we provide system-level performance evidence to show responsive interaction under realistic hardware constraints. Finally, we discuss sociotechnical and pedagogical implications for responsible adoption, positioning ELEVATE as a scalable pathway for privacy-preserving and inclusive GenAI tutoring across heterogeneous school environments.
Lorenzo Stacchio, Michele Giordano, Daniele Berardini +2