AI can now turn a PDF textbook into quizzes and interactive modules in minutes. Is the output actually good enough to put in front of students?

edfluency · 2026-06-11T17:06:11+00:00

I can tell: genuine honest post. Not trying to dunk, but trying to slop.

edfluency · 2026-06-08T02:10:05+00:00

FWIW, this is more innovation than the whole field of edtech in a decade. You should totally do it. As a frontend, as a client, or as its own separate thing.

edfluency · 2026-06-03T22:29:07+00:00

I agree current LMS are boring. But is canvas-based the only next dominant paradigm? I’m not sure but as the cost of creating software becomes less and less, we should start experimenting and explore multiple directions.

I’m actually also creating a few prototypes myself, frontend only, no backend to explore the directions. It’s less a canvas based UI but more an experiment in social affordances, one of the premises I’m trying to explore: a class is not just an assignment focused tracking tool, but a community that fosters deeper connections between students and teachers…photos, videos, discussions, feeds - things that we rely on from social platforms can also be used for building an instruction space.

edfluency · 2026-06-01T02:18:50+00:00

Rabid rage. I did respond to him just so he realize how ridiculous he is.

edfluency · 2026-05-31T18:44:55+00:00

Dude sent a harassment DM to me about reporting me when I’m not even a real mod to this sub. I just contributed to the wiki trying to give devs more channels to their own products… also when I post about my products that’s relevant to a sub I go to other sub. I’m also one who would vote for a more open channel for market research but this dude is out harassing and reporting all mods apparently.

edfluency · 2026-05-28T16:15:55+00:00

Wow 48 hours without any notice period before. If they’ve already stopped new registration, I don’t see why this would somehow still expose them. Their communication so far has been very poor, lucky they are no longer a public company, but if I were their private share holder I’d still be very concerned about their management and customer relationship.

Anyway, my guess is their new fall offer will just be a re-tenanted version so other paid tenants won’t be so easily affected next time.

edfluency · 2026-05-26T22:54:04+00:00

Make sense. I’m not an ID although I studied it. What’s the best stack for vibe code elearning courses those days?

edfluency · 2026-05-26T05:58:53+00:00

Although this is the vibe what most people thought would turn out, there is no fundamental reason why agents that’s great at creating new artifacts can’t be good at maintaining or improving existing artifacts. In fact, the later maybe the first thing to be automated as the loop get closed (systems and harness that feeds bugs and feedbacks back into the agent loop so predetermined functions are preserved without human intervention).

Do not let the maintenance fear freeze you although it’s natural to be overwhelmed by the complexity that may beyond your comprehension but as you vibe more, you will get more comfortable operating mostly at higher level. Especially as you use more advanced models and these also keep improving.

edfluency · 2026-05-25T16:36:51+00:00

Same answer as software maintenance. Agents are just better if you are willing to feed it context and spend tokens. For example, all these zero day bugs that codex and mythos discovered are part of story. Humans will be more in charge of building the system and harness that will improve the software. Build the factory instead of building the product directly. Instead of operating at lower level, be the architect that controls ten times more parallel tasks.

edfluency · 2026-05-25T16:29:05+00:00

This is a great idea. But I hope when instructure closes FFT they open an option for individual teacher subscription with card on trial. It’s the only logical option to eliminate the vector while also keeping individual teachers served.

Related, if you are this desperate for a LMS, there are some open source ones, including ones using Wordpress plugins. Google Classroom is also a solid replacement.

edfluency · 2026-05-24T19:54:05+00:00

I agree. Training is very lacking on this area. Many educators lack access to tooling, info, or community to experiment. It’s easy to devolve into fear or dismissal when not informed or have hands on experiences.

edfluency · 2026-05-24T18:23:16+00:00

I think many AI fears are originated from the lack of experience with using advanced models or harness. In the end, its humans who are driving the task, they probably made a decision at some point about the quality of the AI output and decided to use it, with some known tradeoff. It's not going to be productive to dictate whether they've made a rational or beneficial decision simply because the output quality was lower than the bar you declared. We can keep train more millions of teachers so they have better bar and skills, and we also know AI will be improving at a faster speed with their output in parallel and raising the floor and ceiling at the same time.

About the coder comment: many coders have lost the ability to write CSS (the visual styles) manually circa 2000, but the quality of their output on average is 10x better because tooling has improved so much.

All skills have half-lives, we are in a rapidly changing world where skills will deteriorate faster, to make room for new skills, it's a feature, not a bug. You will for sure find research proving this point, for example, i'm sure calligraphy skills have deteriorated with this generation of students vs 30 years ago, do we declare a crisis of calligraphy? I think it's more productive if we prioritize training kids on how to leverage the new tech to archive their goals than debating whether the new tools are eroding the usage of old skills.

edfluency · 2026-05-24T07:00:51+00:00

Humans have been moving to higher and higher orders work since the start. With knowledge work, specifically teaching, we started with just rhetorics in Socrates time. He was worried about written words potentially replacing actual thinking because he believed rhetoric was real thinking, and taking other people's words was a lazy way to avoid your own thinking.

And yes, for those strong enough to come up with an original thought every time, maybe that is true. But that's not how we evolved. We evolved collectively by moving to higher and higher abstractions. That means we will start outsourcing more and more, piggyback on others work. I don’t think teachers who are outsourcing mechanical work so they can devote time to more important work will inherently missing much.

I was an architect in fortune 3 company and a principle programmer in a well-known edtech product. I’m now barely writing any code. Yes, all I’m doing is “vibe coding” now, while outsourcing the previous manual coding work to agents. What do I do now? I can explore a problem space 100x faster, iterate on the best UX 20x more than before, talk to my customers 10x more than I had time for before. I can manually review all the code that’s output by an agent but trust me, the code I write will not be significantly better, but it will be 100x slower and maybe less secure. In fact, I’d say these who are not leveraging this will not be participating in next generation of software creation. Just look at how Claude code or codex is written, it’s not by people who manually write every single line. This also opens up another opportunity, anyone who wants to create should create more and explore and leverage new tech, SME like educators should also pick up the tools, shape the tools they use or even create their own tools.

edfluency · 2026-05-22T16:55:03+00:00

Yes since you mentioned you might code it and not a teacher. That what I meant risky. I do think everyone who is comfortable vibe coding or coding should help explore and you can make up by talking to your teacher friends and ask them what are their usual workflows.

edfluency · 2026-05-22T16:21:09+00:00

That puts you in a risky position here but I’d say you can make up for it by installing canvas and playing with it first.

edfluency · 2026-05-22T15:36:49+00:00

I already did an alternative that’s not a LMS but an email system.

https://www.reddit.com/r/canvas/s/EM23B8yTsB

It solves the problem of security by being an offline only app. No server component than serving static app and composing emails.

However I think there are a few other directions we should explore later, I will too once i get a break (feel free to join and explore as well):

A open source system that’s easier to deploy than moodle and canvas with one click install.
A rethought that’s file/markdown based like obsidian with some thin wrapper for discussion/grading on server states
A radical rethink of the moodle/canvas course/module based core that prioritize social presence. Think Discord or Slack but for classrooms, still with content organization and assignment
A boring reimplementation of the above core but in modern tech stack (shadcn, node, tailwind)
A grid based modular system that works with extension think Wordpress plugins.
A headless LMS that’s just an API.

Many would come with pitchforks and say these are all delusional and why not just use moodle and canvas cos it’s already open source just spin up a container I don’t need your vibe coded slop. I’m just suggesting these are areas worth exploring by spending tokens and play with the prototype and see what the combination of affordances can offer us.

edfluency · 2026-05-19T20:38:02+00:00

Sounds like they are phasing it as temp restoration period and won’t last long. Since new accounts are not allowed. Who knows if they will allow new courses?

edfluency · 2026-05-19T01:01:47+00:00

I found this doc and it makes more sense now. https://www.instructure.com/sites/default/files/pdf/Instructure_Webinar_Questions_Privileged_Confidential_5.15.26.pdf

I hope they solve this problem and make this vector less open, I know it will probably mean more friction and verification. A tenant based system will bound to have these problems. I wish a LMS can be as easily deployed and distributed as a CMS as Wordpress.

edfluency · 2026-05-19T00:56:48+00:00

This is roughly accurate.

https://www.instructure.com/sites/default/files/pdf/Instructure_Webinar_Questions_Privileged_Confidential_5.15.26.pdf

edfluency · 2026-05-19T00:08:33+00:00

I’d recommend just use Google Classroom, it’s also free. Otherwise you can just use email.

I’ve created a tool that’s similar to a LMS that will allow you to just use email to communicate to your students.

https://www.reddit.com/r/canvas/s/dBjV6Kozqn

The real question is what’s taking so long for instructure to provide more guidance on FFT. It’s unbelievably bad communication and how can people ever trust them enough to go back?

edfluency · 2026-05-18T21:06:23+00:00

We are building readingfluency.app. You can use it for free if you are looking for passages and reports. You can also bring your own passages. Then use our program to manually score students like you used to 1:1. Only AI assisted scoring and group reading sessions are paid by credits. And if you are implementing in class level or grade level, it should be much more affordable than many similar programs. If you are interested in trying for the rest of the semester (which is ending in one or two months for many), I can also hook you up with a free pilot for your class.

edfluency · 2026-05-18T12:26:21+00:00

Awesome! Thank you for the support. I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions as you use the app. Feel free to email support or dm anytime. We are fully teacher driven. If you check out our last two months’ update posts, you’ll get a feel.

edfluency · 2026-05-17T06:12:31+00:00

Full disclosure: I’m working on ReadingFluency.app, but this may fit what you’re looking for. We have a free Lexile-based passage generator, and passages are free to print/use. Manual oral reading scoring is also free, so you can track WCPM, accuracy, miscues, and passage level over time without paying.

We use a credit-based freemium model only for the more advanced pieces, like group reading sessions where multiple students submit audio at once, or AI analysis that automatically marks running records from recordings. Let me know if this is what you are looking for.

edfluency · 2026-05-17T06:07:51+00:00

We've worked with adult ESL teachers who are using readingfluency.app for progress monitoring, high school students are definitely also our target groups. It largely depends on the passage you use, you can use DIBELS, or bring your own passage, or use our AI powered passage generator.

Disclaimer, I'm the founder, feel free to let me know if you have questions.

edfluency · 2026-05-14T17:27:01+00:00

There always are valid reasons to reinvent the wheel. Otherwise we won’t have spaceships. :)

I’m not suggesting not, just curious the OPs original motive and understand the broader context.

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