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...in which I don't go up mountains

Category: An Edinburgh Model for Online Teaching, Module 2: Engaged Online Teaching

Graphic: Artificial Intelligence

Teacherbot!

Reading Time: 5 minutes
Photo of a friendly robot

This is actually Pepper, not Teacherbot

What is Teacherbot?

Teacherbot is an artificial intelligence project to automate some aspects of teaching, thereby improving efficiency and allowing for the more ‘teacher-light’ tuition required for providing courses on the scale of MOOCs.

I had been interested in hearing more about Teacherbot ever since I first heard of it at the IT Futures conference in December, so it was a very nice surprise to see it featuring in the online education course.

Teacherbot was created to engage with students of Edinburgh University’s e-learning and digital cultures MOOC on Twitter. Teacherbot replied to tweets containing the #edcmooc hashtag, with responses drawing on keywords and how they were linked through terms such as “and” or “not”. It engaged with hundreds of students, tweeting about 1,500 times over the duration of the course.

Teacherbot could answer simple questions, and could respond to more complex questions by posting key quotes or asking ‘Would anyone else like to connect?’ Students felt it helped them engage with the idea of automated teaching, and said that Teacherbot had prompted them to think.

Photo of a laptop showing the back of a teacher writing on a blackboard

Engaged Online Teaching and the University’s Strategic Plan

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Image: Not very engaged online teaching

Why teach online?

The University of Edinburgh’s (2016) Strategic Plan endorses “a digital culture that will culminate in a university where: every core service is fully digital; every educator is a digital educator; every student is a digital student”.

Who are our distance learners?

Online students tend to be older, more professionally minded, and with greater challenges to overcome in their work-life balance. Engaged online teaching can help with this.

What are the unique challenges faced by distance learners?

In ‘Making Distance Visible: Assembling Nearness in an Online Distance Learning Programme’, the authors make some key points

Web Accessibility Word Cloud

Accessibility Experiment: Listening to a Web based Article via Audio

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Accessibility Experiment

When I looked up the article about Teacherbot, I decided to try out something else new, and take advantage of an accessibility feature of the online journal it was in: I noticed they had an audio option available and I thought that was great, so I had the article read out to me!

Screenshot of a professional journal with an audio option

Audio version of Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching. Journal: Teaching in Higher Education
Critical Perspectives
Volume 20, 2015 – Issue 4: Twentieth Anniversary Special Issue. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13562517.2015.1020783


Audio version of Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching.
Journal: Teaching in Higher Education: Critical Perspectives Volume 20, 2015 – Issue 4: Twentieth Anniversary Special Issue.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13562517.2015.1020783

It was an interesting experience in itself, and listening through the navigation options was a valuable reminder of the importance of making the navigation as accessible to those who can’t see where the options are as to those who can.

Online Education Word Cloud

Reading Time: < 1 minutes

What is Online Education?

We were all asked to contribute 3-5 words that should be defining or desirable characteristics of online education:

Online education word cloud

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