Giving Compass' Take:

• Ashok K. Goel, a professor of computer science and cognitive science, is experimenting with chatbots as teacher assistants. He found that bots can help human teachers with automated tasks and can free up time for them (humans) to work on more personalized learning styles with their students. 

• What are the benefits of chatbots? What are the potential harms for higher education? 

• Read about how technology and artificial intelligence is helping in other industries, such as the development aid sector. 

Can college students tell the difference between a human teaching assistant and a chatbot? A Georgia Tech computer scientist has been pursuing that question for several years. And the answer has profound implications for the future of college teaching.

Ashok K. Goel, a professor of computer science and cognitive science, and his team have refined perhaps the first robot teaching assistant, dubbed Jill Watson.

Here’s the scenario: Last year in an online course on artificial intelligence with 400 students, two chatbots joined 13 human TAs to answer student questions about the course and its content. Students were told that software robots were in the mix, and they were challenged to identify which of the voices they were interacting with were human and which were machine.

At the end of the semester about half of the students correctly guessed that Stacy was merely computer code. Only ten percent correctly identified Ian as a bot. And ten percent mistakenly thought that two of the human TAs were chatbots.

“The human TAs were just answering the more mundane questions again and again and again,” Goel says. “By automating some of the very mundane things, we’re freeing up time,” he says, to do things like give more-detailed answers to other student questions. “There are so many things to do as a teacher that students can take as much of your time as you have,” he argues.

Outside of higher education, the era of assistive bots has arrived (just ask Siri on your iPhone or Alexa in your kitchen). But there has been resistance by many in higher education to bringing them onto campus because they are associated with being too automated and too impersonal, says Brian Fleming, executive director of an innovation center at Southern New Hampshire University.

Read the full article about chatbots in higher ed by Jeffrey R. Young at EdSurge