Joyner’s latest project on the online education platform edX, an experimental pilot titled “Foundations of Generative AI,” is something new, Fortune can exclusively reveal. It uses a virtual avatar named DAI-vid, modeled after Joyner’s own appearance and voice. The avatar delivers lectures while wearing a signature binary-coded bracelet. Joyner explained that if you see him onscreen wearing a bracelet, that’s actually DAI-vid talking.
The course introduces Joyner’s avatar—DAI-vid—upfront, so students know they’re watching AI-generated instruction. The avatar is clearly identified with a visible indicator: a bracelet created by Joyner’s daughter (which spells AI in binary digits) ensures students always know when the presenter is the AI. Joyner used HeyGen, a generative AI video platform, to create his avatar, training it with a five-minute studio recording that captured his appearance and speech patterns.
Agarwal said he was excited by the results: “AI is augmenting the teacher and turns teachers into super teachers.” Far from eliminating teachers, it is multiplying their reach and impact, he said. “It democratizes teaching.” Everybody can be a great teacher with these AI tools, he insisted, but there’s a catch: these AI tools still don’t substitute for human skills and knowhow.
“If you’re a bad teacher, this isn’t going to make you a good teacher,” Agarwal said. “But if you’re a good teacher, this is going to make it so you can teach a lot more people and teach a lot more subjects and teach in a lot more contexts. But you still have to have that expertise.”
Joyner agreed, clarifying that AI gets added to the relationship after all the intellectual heavy lifting by (the human version of) him is done: “This is an AI assisting an instructor, but the instructor ultimately [is] the author and responsible party for everything.” He said it’s definitely not the case that he’s telling a robot to design his course, it’s more like he’s working with robots to amplify the course delivery once he’s done designing it himself.
Agarwal said he knows many professors “who can write quite well, but are tongue-tied in front of a camera,” lacking the kind of hand gestures, enthusiasm, and even voice inflection that makes for a successful instructor. He explained that he sees AI as part of a natural progression in teaching, noting the huge advances in course instruction from even 10, 20 years ago. The richest colleges and universities were able to improve education, taking one professor’s wonky scribblings and turning them into slick presentations with the help of “graphic designers, video editors, text writers, amazing teaching assistants, all kinds of people—a professor could have a huge team,” Agarwal said. A lot of those functions can now be done by AI, he added, “and every teacher at every college, poor or rich, can have an amazing team and a supporting cast.” He said that instead of harming education, AI will “democratize” it.
For Joyner, working with AI has made course creation a more personal process: “The analogy I have is when I do a traditional course production, it feels like a Marvel big-budget movie production… This [AI process] feels more like an auteur indie film.” He said he feels like this course “captures” him much more—even though it’s DAI-vid talking, not David.
To be sure, an intensive, semester-long course at Stanford like this one is very different from a three-week open course like Joyner’s. Still, Joyner is taking nearly the opposite tack, prioritizing scale and efficiencies through AI-assisted grading, with safeguards built into the process. Essays are evaluated through a tool called “GradyAI,” and the key thing, according to Agarwal, “is that students learn better from rapid feedback cycles.” He explained that traditionally, students submit an essay, wait a week, and get feedback, but GradyAI makes feedback nearly instant. “And anything a TA would need to escalate, a human can still take over. We see this as a crucible to experiment with the best of both AI and human teaching.”
When asked about potential mistakes or even hallucinations in the grading of papers through AI technology, Agarwal explained that the grading tool provides very detailed feedback, and students can ask for a regrade if they disagree. “Within a minute, GradyAI will have regraded them based on the feedback. And the students can escalate to a faculty member for a live look, if they want to.”
Regarding the subject of cheating and whether students might use AI to write essays, edX told Fortune that GradyAI has cheating detection built into its algorithms that can be turned on or off depending on the application. This works by extracting a student’s skills from their submitted assignments and flagging inconsistencies with the skills that are subsequently displayed. It uses the same skills extraction algorithms to report a student’s skill development over a course as a demonstration of learning progress.
Agarwal said the system was also designed to accommodate privacy laws and newly emerging regulations in areas like Europe, and this is a bit difficult as it’s such a nascent space. “The laws are changing so fast.”
One of the most transformative aspects is accessibility. The tools allow courses to be instantly translated and altered to fit many different learning styles and needs—including learners with disabilities, or those needing support in different languages. “With one course, I can explode it exponentially a million-fold and truly customize learning to each student,” Agarwal said. He said he envisioned a future where every learner can “zap” a course into their preferred level, language, or pace—radically personalizing education at scale.
In a separate interview, Agarwal made clear that he’s a big believer in AI, having spent decades exploring its potential, from building energy-efficient “organic computing” models in the early 2000s to pioneering online learning with edX’s nearly 100 million global learners today. He is incredibly bullish on AI, telling Fortune that this will be “the decade to beat all decades” in terms of technological advancement.
Agarwal also acknowledged the chaos unleashed in job markets and among students, pointing to coding as a specific example. “The boot-camp business completely imploded and … does not exist anymore, pretty much. And it’s because all those entry-level coding jobs went away because coding moved to a higher level.”
Agarwal predicted a “tsunami of people that are coming who are hell-bent on upskilling with AI,” and said he’s working with major corporate clients who “want to upskill tens of thousands of people within their own company … It is much, much easier to upskill an existing employee than try to lay off and hire somebody else. So my sense is that this upskilling tsunami is coming.” (Agarwal declined to name the client, citing confidentiality.)
In other words, millions of people will need new skills, and they might be getting them from a professor’s avatar, wearing a bracelet, with a name like DAI-vid.
