The Mindsmith Agent is your built-in instructional design partner. Rather than just executing basic commands, the agent collaborates with you to build effective, engaging learning experiences. It can research your uploaded documents, plan out a lesson structure, ask you for clarification, and build fully formatted lesson pages.
Here is a comprehensive guide to how the Mindsmith Agent works and how you can collaborate with it to create your best content.
The Lesson Generation Workflow
When you ask the agent to create a new lesson, it follows a structured instructional design workflow to ensure high-quality results.
1. Research and Planning
First, the agent reviews your instructions and any source materials you have provided. It reads your uploaded documents, reviews images, and analyzes video transcripts. If it needs up-to-date facts or recent statistics, it can even perform a live web search.
Once it understands the goal, the agent creates a step-by-step plan. You will see this plan update in real-time as the agent marks steps as pending, in-progress, or completed.
2. Asking Clarifying Questions
If your request is broad or missing critical details, the agent will pause its work and ask you up-to-date clarifying questions. These questions appear in the conversation panel on the side of your screen.
You can type your own responses or click on the suggested answers provided by the agent. If you prefer, you can skip the questions, and the agent will proceed using its best judgment and instructional design best practices.
3. Building the Storyboard
Before generating any actual lesson pages, the agent drafts a storyboard. This outline includes:
A descriptive overview of the lesson
Specific, measurable learning objectives
A page-by-page outline of what the lesson will cover
The agent will stop and present this storyboard to you. You can chat with the agent to refine the objectives or rearrange the topics. The agent will not generate the final lesson pages until you approve the storyboard outline.
4. Generating the Lesson
Once you approve the storyboard, the agent goes to work building the actual lesson. It automatically creates pages and populates them with a variety of elements, including text tiles, image tiles, question tiles, and interactive elements like flashcards or accordions.
Collaborating with the Agent
The agent is designed to work alongside you as you edit and refine your content.
Context-Aware Editing
The agent always knows what you are looking at. If you are in the storyboard view, it focuses on your outline. If you are in the lesson editor, it knows which page you are on.
You can select specific tiles on a page and give targeted instructions, such as:
"Make this text tile shorter."
"Add a quiz to this page based on the content above."
"Change the layout of these selected tiles."
Handling Multimedia
The agent is highly capable when it comes to images and video:
Video extraction: The agent reads video transcripts to understand the material. It can also extract specific visual frames from your uploaded videos to use as images on your lesson pages.
Image generation: It can prompt the AI to generate custom images that fit your lesson's context.
Image editing: If you want to modify a generated image (for example, "remove the background" or "add our company logo to this image"), you can ask the agent to edit it directly.
Accessibility: The agent automatically writes descriptive alt text for every image it generates or places, ensuring your lesson is accessible to all learners.
Reviewing and Evaluating
You can ask the agent to act as an evaluator for existing content. Simply ask it to "review this lesson." The agent will analyze your pages against standard instructional design frameworks (like Bloom's Taxonomy) and suggest an action plan for improvement. It will wait for your approval before making any of the suggested edits.
Practical Tips for Success
Be specific with your audience: Tell the agent who the target learners are (e.g., "new retail hires" or "senior management"). This helps the agent tailor the tone and complexity of the text tiles.
Leverage the conversation panel: Take the time to answer the agent's clarifying questions. Providing a few quick details early on prevents extensive rewrites later.
Use the storyboard phase: Don't rush past the storyboard! It is much faster to have the agent add, remove, or combine topics in the storyboard outline than it is to rewrite fully generated lesson pages.
Report when stuck: Occasionally, the agent might struggle to complete a complex formatting task. If it fails multiple times, it will automatically submit a failure report so our team can improve the system. You can simply refresh the page or try breaking your request into smaller, simpler steps.
Learn More
AI Prompting Tips — how to get the best lessons out of Mindsmith
Creating a Lesson with AI — all the ways to start building a lesson