Who Steers Odysseus's Ship? The Nostos from Generative to Agentic AI in Distance Learning

Abstract

Generative AI has become part of everyday practice in open and distance learning, and a second shift is already underway, from systems that answer to systems that act. This editorial reads that shift through Homer's Odyssey and argues one thing: as tasks pass to autonomous agents, the human, whether learner, teacher, or designer, must remain the one who decides and who is in the loop. The agentic turn unsettles much of what the field has long taken for granted. It puts in doubt who is genuinely present and doing the learning, who is accountable for work an agent has carried out, and whether the productive difficulty in which understanding forms survives being automated away. Reading the emerging literature through this concern, the editorial moves from presence and accountability to the friction worth keeping, and finally to what the discipline itself must do; along the way, it extends Moore's grammar of interaction to learner-agent, agent-agent, and human-agent-human relations. Agentic AI is a craft in the service of pedagogy, and the task is to keep the friction in which judgment is formed while a human hand stays on the tiller.