Designing an AI research coach with clear human boundaries
Agentic Educational Research Coach (AERC). Developed through Product Faculty’s AI Product Management certificate work. Certificate earned July 2026.
- Context
- Faculty beginning educational research often need help turning a teaching observation into a focused research opportunity. AERC supports that early assessment and prepares a structured brief for a human mentor.
- My contribution
- I designed and built a working agentic AI prototype, serving as product lead, agent architect, evaluator, and prototype developer. The work included product requirements, workflow architecture, prompt and context design, governance controls, and behavioral evaluation.
- Product and governance decisions
- Ground recommendations in a supplied synthetic evidence library, evaluation rubric, and decision criteria.
- Produce a reviewable brief with a recommendation, rationale, supporting references, uncertainty, and mentor discussion points.
- Define when the agent should recommend proceeding, revising, or pausing—and when it should refuse or escalate a request.
- Keep consequential scholarly, methodological, and ethical decisions with a human mentor.
- End the workflow before study design or research approval.
- Evaluation and status
- The working prototype passed behavioral testing using synthetic scenarios, including checks on evidence use, uncertainty, and human decision boundaries. This demonstrates prototype behavior; real-world workflow benefits have not yet been established.