AI Ideas: AI Agents in Instructional Design

One of the most helpful guides on AI agents is Dr. Phillipa Hardman's "Make Instructional Design Fun Again with AI Agents" published in May of 2025 on her substack.

Dr. Hardman is a UK-based educator with an excellent grasp on using AI in the context of high quality instruction.

The post is divided into four parts:

1. Defining an AI agent

2. Building an agent

   1. Triggers - when the agent should run

   2. Instructions - what the agent should do

   3. Outputs - what the agent should produce

   4. She recommends platforms like Zapier, Make.com, and Relay for their of use.

3. Using AI agents in Instructional Design

   1. Use areas and limitations:

      1. Some tasks are so structured and functional that they can be delegated & automated with minimal need for human checking and validation.

      2. Other tasks can be delegated to an agent, but require careful checking to ensure the quality of outputs.

      3. Some tasks require an amount of judgement and expertise which makes agentic automation risky without significant human intervention.

   2. Agents for Analysis - "identifying learner knowledge gaps, motivations, context and real performance challenges."

   3. Agents for Design - "defining learning objectives, sequencing content, selecting instructional strategies, and choosing how learners will practice and be assessed."

   4. Agents for Development - "writing scripts, producing content, building prototypes, and often QA'ing every pixel of the final product."

   5. Agents for Implementation - "coordinating launches, managing stakeholders, tracking enrolment, and handling the inevitable hiccups as learners engage with your content."

   6. Agents for Evaluation - "where you measure whether learning worked—across learner reactions, skills gained, on-the-job application, and business impact."

4. Building an Agent in Zapier Step-by-Step

This guide seems helpful and imminently practical with succinct examples of agents and a quick how-to. A great resource to get started with and play with over the summer.

AI Generated. Not sure having AI put band aids on skinned knees makes the most sense.

To play with it, I ran the SEO Analysis Agent on a school website of a colleague's. Although this wasn't my building an agent from scratch, it helped familiarize myself with the interface and actions of Zapier.

The agent stopped for clarifications on keyword determination - interfacing like a normal chatbot and then ran a full report - searching the school's site and analyzing it fully. Helpful for summer!

That being said, I think took this project as a prompt and put it directly into ChatGPT - receiving a similar report once I provided the URL. So the usage of an AI agent might be dependent on what you're linking together - with Zapier providing the ability to connect different applications together with AI and workflows.