Much research and development work is being undertaken on educational agents. Each project, it seems, starts out from its own educational needs and theoretical bases. In this paper, an attempt is made to approach educational agents from a pedagogical view. Based on a model of learning and teaching that tries to keep its distance from individual "schools" of learning theories, it looks at educational agents as members of the faculty of a global virtual university: What is their role in the learning process and how do theyfulfill it? The paper suggests a basic distinction between pedagogic roles for agents: "simulated" vs. "emergent" roles, where the first are modeled on human educators of any kind, while the second are new and specific for virtual learning settings. We conclude that there remain many more new educational agents to invent.