online course developers

Abstract: Technology tools used for professional upskilling change on a timescale of weeks, and written guidance about them ages at the same pace. Large language models have made it inexpensive to draft a tutorial or a course outline, but most deployed generation systems still produce a piece of content once and never check it against what an audience actually does with it. This paper describes an agentic pipeline, organized as a typed workflow graph, that treats instructional content production as a manufacturing process with explicit checkpoints rather than a single generation call. Four node classes structure the graph: deterministic scripts, model steps bound to a fixed rubric, open-ended agent phases, and human approval gates, arranged along a forward production path and closed by a feedback cycle that rewrites generation rules from post level engagement telemetry. Production of content is split into two layers: a demand layer, built from video and community sources, that shapes topic selection and register, and an authority layer, built from official documentation, that every published claim must trace back to. Over five months of continuous operation, the deployed system published 26 documented guides at roughly 1.5 hours of operator time per week, and the feedback loop identified four measurable engagement effects that became binding rules for later runs, including a hook style that outperformed baseline by a factor of 1.83 in its first analysis window.

Abstract: Knowledge tracing (KT) models need many logged learners, so a new course or platform starts without a usable model. In LLM-based KT the LLM generates the answer, which we call System-Two; it is either fine-tuned on the target data or reasons and votes over ten samples, which is slow and gives coarse probabilities. We ask whether an off-the-shelf System-One LLM, which returns a probability for a typed question directly in a single pass, can perform KT when few or no learners are logged. On seven datasets, Jev without any data from the target platform reaches a mean AUC of .706, above the best of 28 deep KT models trained on 8 learners (.689) and above System-Two Thinking-KT on all seven datasets (.650) at about 1/100 of its API cost. Adding examples and a similar-learner statistic from the logged learners (JevKT) raises this to .722; JevKT stays significantly ahead of deep KT up to 16 learners and ahead on average up to 64, and supervised KT catches up between 64 and 128 learners. Among the readers we tested, the gain is specific to Jev, since three other LLMs queried with the byte-identical typed request through the official System-One adapter fall below it on all seven datasets, and reader swaps and contamination checks find no evidence that the input format or memorised data explain the gain. For new learners the advantage holds from their first interactions, whereas on unseen items with all learners logged, deep KT remains ahead.

Abstract: Teaching abstract theoretical computer science (TCS) concepts such as algorithm analysis and complexity theory is challenging because students must handle formal proofs and asymptotic reasoning that conventional resources rarely explain in an adaptive, on-demand way. We present AlgoRAG, a specialized Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that couples a large language model (LLM) with a curated, domain-specific knowledge base to address these challenges. The knowledge base integrates authoritative textbooks, 847 lecture slides, 312 practice problems with solutions, 156 worked proof templates, and 89 complexity worksheets. AlgoRAG incorporates domain-specific optimizations including mathematical entity recognition, notation-aware retrieval, and pedagogical re-ranking. We evaluate AlgoRAG on 179 curated exam-style questions spanning asymptotic analysis, recurrence relations, dynamic programming, graph algorithms, NP-completeness, sorting, and divide-and-conquer. The system achieves a 100% success rate with a mean response time of 38.0 seconds. While BLEU-4 scores are zero -- a known limitation of n-gram matching on mathematical proofs where equivalent reasoning may use entirely different notation -- AlgoRAG attains ROUGE-1 F1 of 0.0963, ROUGE-L F1 of 0.0683, and a pedagogical quality score of 0.7620, indicating that responses are well-structured and didactically sound even when surface wording diverges from reference answers. Performance is especially strong on NP-completeness (ROUGE-1 F1 = 0.1285, pedagogical quality = 0.7643) and graph algorithms (ROUGE-1 F1 = 0.1023, pedagogical quality = 0.8086). These results support the conclusion that RAG is an effective architecture for personalized theoretical-CS instruction, providing correct, context-rich explanations even for highly abstract topics.