OpenMAIC
OpenMAIC is an open-source multi-agent classroom platform from Tsinghua University's THU-MAIC team. It turns any topic or uploaded PDF into a full interactive lesson, with AI teachers, quizzes, whiteboard work and slide exports.
What is OpenMAIC?
OpenMAIC, short for Open Multi-Agent Interactive Classroom, is an open-source platform that turns a topic description or an uploaded document into a complete, playable lesson. It comes from the THU-MAIC team at Tsinghua University, and its premise is a deliberate break with the MOOC model: instead of a recorded lecture you watch, it generates a classroom you sit in, populated by an AI teacher, AI teaching assistants and AI classmates who ask questions, take opposing views and draw on a shared whiteboard.
Generation runs in two stages. The first reads your input, whether a sentence such as "teach me Python from scratch in thirty minutes" or a PDF you upload, and produces a structured lesson outline. The second expands each item of that outline into a scene: narrated slides, a quiz with its marking rubric, an interactive HTML simulation, or a project-based activity with roles and milestones. An action engine drives more than twenty-eight action types during playback, from speech and whiteboard drawing to spotlight and laser-pointer effects, while LangGraph orchestrates which agent speaks when.
The stack is Next.js, React, TypeScript and Tailwind CSS, with browser-side state in Zustand and IndexedDB, packaged as a pnpm monorepo. You bring your own model: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Alibaba Qwen, Zhipu GLM, MiniMax and others are supported, alongside any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Optional keys add voice narration, spoken answers, live web search through Tavily, image generation, and heavier PDF parsing through MinerU. Finished lessons export to editable PowerPoint or to self-contained interactive HTML.
Three routes exist: self-hosting with Docker or Node, a one-click Vercel deployment, or an access code for the project's hosted instance. The software is free under the MIT licence, though the running costs of the APIs it calls are yours.
The research behind it was published in the Journal of Computer Science and Technology in 2026, and the team reports validation with more than seven hundred students at Tsinghua. One warning: openmaic.io is not the project's official site, and several of its claims, the licence in particular, are out of date.
What it does
- Generate a complete interactive lesson from a single sentence
- Turn an uploaded PDF or research paper into a structured course
- Have AI teachers deliver slides with voice narration and live whiteboard work
- Run auto-generated quizzes that are graded instantly with personalised feedback
- Stage discussions and roundtable debates between AI classmates
- Export finished lessons to editable PowerPoint or standalone HTML
- Self-host the whole platform on your own infrastructure
When to use OpenMAIC / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if OpenMAIC is the right fit.
When to use OpenMAIC
- Teachers and lecturers who need interactive lesson material without hours of preparation
- Instructional designers and e-learning developers building courses out of existing documents
- Schools and universities that must keep learner data on their own infrastructure
- Self-learners who prefer an active classroom to a passive video course
- Researchers turning papers into teaching material, and corporate trainers building onboarding paths
When not to use OpenMAIC
- Organisations that need a supplier-issued contract: no terms, no DPA and no privacy policy are published
- Non-technical users without an access code, who cannot deploy Node.js, Docker or Vercel themselves
- Teams shopping for a turnkey SaaS with commercial support and an SLA
- Buyers who need GDPR compliance attested by the vendor rather than carried by their own deployment
- Anyone expecting a native mobile experience: there is no iOS or Android application
How to use OpenMAIC
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Decide how you want to run it: hosted instance, one-click Vercel deployment, or a local install
- For the quickest route, open the GitHub repository and use the Deploy with Vercel button
- Add at least one model API key, from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or another supported provider
- For a local install, check you have Node.js 20 or later and pnpm 10 or later
- Clone the repository and install the dependencies with pnpm install
- Copy the example environment file to .env.local and fill in your provider keys
- Start the development server with pnpm dev and open port 3000 in your browser
- Optionally add keys for text-to-speech, speech recognition, web search, image generation or PDF parsing
- Describe the topic you want taught, or upload a PDF, then launch the generation
- Sit through the lesson, then export it to PowerPoint or interactive HTML if you want to reuse it
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Released under the MIT licence: the code is fully inspectable and commercial use costs nothing
- Can be self-hosted on-premises, on a private cloud or on Vercel, keeping learner data in-house
- No vendor lock-in, with more than ten interchangeable model providers and free choice of voice services
- Real academic grounding: a paper in the Journal of Computer Science and Technology and an arXiv preprint
- Actively maintained, with six dated releases during 2026 and a large contributor community
- Output stays usable outside the tool thanks to editable PowerPoint and standalone HTML export
- A hosted instance exists for anyone who does not want to install anything
Cons
- Free software does not mean free to run: model, voice and search API calls are billed to you
- Needs Node.js, pnpm and a command line, unless you use Vercel or the hosted instance
- No privacy policy, no terms of service and no contact page are published on the site
- Nothing at all is said about data retention, subprocessors or model training
- No mobile application and no browser extension
- The presentation site is materially out of date, still advertising the former AGPL-3.0 licence
- The only contact route on the site is one academic email address, and its Discord link is dead
Pricing & Plans
OpenMAIC is free of charge. It is open-source software released under the MIT licence, there is no paid plan, and no price is published either on the site or in the repository; the site's own structured data records a price of 0 USD. Running costs should nevertheless be expected, since the platform calls language model, text-to-speech, speech recognition and web search APIs using keys the user supplies, and hosting is at the user's expense.
- free
- MIT licence
- you supply your own model API keys
- free
- requires at least one provider API key
- free
- access granted by access code
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how OpenMAIC handles your data.
GDPR overview
There is no GDPR information of any kind on this site. Searching every archived page of the domain returns no occurrence of GDPR, of personal data or of privacy policy, and the usual legal paths all return 404. No data controller is named, no Article 27 representative is designated, no retention period is stated and no processing agreement is offered. This silence is why the compliance flag reads N: the site does not deny compliance, it simply never raises the subject. Because OpenMAIC is self-hosted software, the practical effect is that GDPR obligations sit with the institution that deploys it rather than with the project. That is defensible for open-source code, but it leaves an organisation with nothing to rely on contractually.
Who owns the data?
No terms of service and no privacy policy are published on the site, so it never states who owns the material produced in a classroom. In practice the deployment settles the question: OpenMAIC is software you run yourself, and the project argues that hosting it on your own infrastructure keeps student data under your control. Whoever operates the instance therefore holds the data. One caveat matters. Generating a lesson sends your topic descriptions and uploaded documents to whichever model provider you supplied a key for, so that provider's own terms govern what happens to them, and the same applies to the voice and web search services you enable.
Reuse rights
With no terms of service on the site, nothing is set down in writing about reuse. What is documented is the licence of the software itself: the official repository releases OpenMAIC under the MIT licence, which permits commercial use free of charge. The site is behind on this point, still advertising AGPL-3.0 and a paid commercial licence. Lessons you generate can be exported as editable PowerPoint files or as self-contained interactive HTML, and nothing published limits what an operator does with that output. Anything routed to a third-party model provider stays subject to that provider's conditions.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
No hosting jurisdiction is declared anywhere on the site. That is partly a consequence of the model rather than an omission alone: OpenMAIC is software you run yourself, so the data lives wherever you deploy it, on your own servers, a private cloud, a Docker host or Vercel. The project's case for open source rests on exactly this point, that running it on your own infrastructure keeps learner data under your control. Two things fall outside that control. Generating a lesson sends your topic descriptions and uploaded documents to the model provider whose key you configured, so their infrastructure processes them, and the same holds for the text-to-speech, speech recognition and web search services you enable. The project's hosted demo instance publishes nothing about where it runs. The presentation site itself sits behind Cloudflare on an anycast address. Anyone with a jurisdictional requirement should treat hosting as their own responsibility and choose providers accordingly.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting OpenMAIC.
- This is not the project's official site: the OpenMAIC repository never links to openmaic.io, yet the page carries a Tsinghua University copyright. Check any fact against the repository before relying on it
- The licence shown here is wrong. The site still advertises AGPL-3.0 and paid commercial licensing, while the project moved to MIT in June 2026, which permits commercial use free of charge
- The site's structured data claims a 4.8 rating from 3,700 reviews. No rating system exists for this project; the figure is an outdated GitHub star count dressed up as reviews
- Published contact and community details are unreliable: the Discord invite is dead, and the email address differs from the one in the official repository
- Nothing is published about personal data. Deploying this in a school or a company makes you the data controller, with no supplier documentation to fall back on
- Running costs are easy to underestimate. The software is free, but every lesson generated consumes paid model, voice and search API calls
- Lessons are written by language models and can be confidently wrong. Material intended for learners should be reviewed by someone who knows the subject before it is taught
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Difficulty depends entirely on the route taken. Requesting an access code for the hosted instance needs no technical skill at all. The one-click Vercel deployment is easy: press the button in the repository and paste in a single model API key. A local or Docker install is a moderate step, assuming Node.js 20 or later, pnpm 10 or later, a command line and an environment file to edit. Optional extras such as voice, speech recognition, web search and advanced PDF parsing each need their own key, which adds configuration rather than real difficulty.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind OpenMAIC
Fundraising
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What is OpenMAIC?
How much does it cost?
Which licence applies?
Do I need to know how to code?
Which language model providers are supported?
Can I reuse the lessons elsewhere?
What does the site say about personal data and the GDPR?
Is openmaic.io the project's official website?
Should you pick OpenMAIC?
OpenMAIC is one of the more convincing pieces of open-source education software available today, and the evidence for that sits outside the site presenting it. The project has a widely starred and actively maintained repository, six dated releases across 2026, published research in the Journal of Computer Science and Technology, an arXiv preprint, and a working hosted instance anyone can try. The idea behind it is genuinely different from a course generator: it does not build slides for you to narrate, it stages a classroom that runs itself, complete with a teacher who speaks, classmates who argue, a whiteboard that fills up and quizzes that mark themselves. For a teacher, an instructional designer or a self-learner, that is worth an evening of trying.
Two reservations deserve weight. The first is that openmaic.io is not the project's official site. The repository never links to it, several of its claims are out of date, the licence it advertises is the wrong one, and its structured data presents a fabricated rating. Anyone relying on facts from this page should confirm them against the repository. The second is that the domain publishes no legal framework at all: no terms, no privacy policy, no retention rules, no contact page. For a personal experiment that changes nothing. For a school or a company deploying it to real learners, it means the whole compliance burden is yours from the first day, with no supplier documentation to lean on.
Judged as software, OpenMAIC is solid and free. Judged through this particular website, it is poorly represented. Go to the source before you commit.
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