Teaching Latin with a guide inside the course

We built a video-based Latin 1 course paired with a custom learning agent that tutors students in context, inside the tradition, while keeping instructors in the loop.

Language learning needs conversation, correction, and patient practice. A video course can teach the material, but it cannot sit next to a student at 10 p.m. and help them work through a translation.

Generic chatbots fill that gap poorly. They answer in the wrong voice, skip past the discipline, and give students shortcuts instead of practice. Instructors lose visibility into how learners are actually reasoning, which is the part that matters most in a classical language.

The question we wanted to answer was simple. Could we put a tutor inside the course itself, one that sounds like the course, stays in the discipline, and gives instructors a window into every exchange?

The Challenge

We designed the course and the agent together, not as two products stitched together after the fact.

The video course carries the instruction. Each lesson introduces vocabulary, grammar, and translation in the instructor's voice. The learning agent lives next to the lessons, ready to practice with students in the same tone and the same vocabulary the course just taught.

Instead of treating the assistant as a generic Q&A bot, we treated it as a guide inside the tradition. It does not summarize Latin for students. It practices Latin with them.

The Approach

The result was more than a successful Latin I pilot. It demonstrated that guided practice can scale without sacrificing instructor visibility or the distinct character of a course.

Students could engage Latin through an assistant shaped to the voice and logic of the discipline, rather than through a generic AI experience. Instructors remained close to the learning, with visibility into each exchange and insight into how understanding developed over time.

Just as importantly, the project gave us a repeatable model for building humane, course-embedded AI, one that strengthens practice, preserves the instructor’s role, and can now be extended into other disciplines.

The Result

Want this for your course?

We build video courses paired with custom learning agents for institutions that care about both practice and instructor oversight.