Teacherbot, useful tool or just another example of the allure of innovation

When I read the following article

Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching by Sian Bayne. Teaching in Higher Education. Published online 16 Apr 2015. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/13562517.2015.1020783

I noted with interest that students had dropped the descriptor ‘teacher’ from the bot developed for the E-learning and digital cultures MOOC (University of Edinburgh).  Perhaps like me students could not discern any teacherly function of botty (the name that students adopted for teacherbot) that could not be otherwise achieved by providing a repository of curated resources and a frequently answered questions (FAQ) list.

Undoubtedly the agent that follows the MOOC hashtag (#edcmooc) and harvests student questions and comments is useful, but what did botty achieve? The behaviour of teacherbot (a rule based agent developed by the teachers to automate tweet responses) is problematic for me. Instead of making queries about the course (for example, about assessment procedure) available to all students in their collated form i.e. as a list of FAQs, botty responds to each student individually through twitter. Furthermore, although 60% of the enrolled students are postgraduates (as is the case for many MOOCs) with a professional interest in digital education botty pushes individual resources to individual students. Surely, for this demographic it is access to a curated resource repository that is valuable. 

Teacherbot is positioned as a research initiative that seeks new ways of understanding and developing automated teaching through adopting a critical posthumanist perspective.  While arguing for a critical posthumanist approach Bayne reviewed a previous initiative for automating teaching that was funded by the ESRC http://www.tel.ac.uk highlighting efficiency and productivity as the dominant discourse for that program. However, that section of the Bayne article mystified me. A closer look at the title of one of the targeted articles[1] offers a very different interpretation; higher quality and more effective learning are the outcomes that were envisioned. Nevertheless, Bayne develops a narrative that characterises the current conversation about automated teaching as dispute, with efficiency gains and teacher resistance oppositional views that need to be resolved. By response teacherbot is positioned as  ‘an assemblage of the human and non-human’ unhindered by humanistic assumption and efficiency agendas and thereby provides a new way of revisiting teacher automation.

Does teacherbot make a research contribution? The article is eloquently written and intriguing to read. However, the outcomes are mainly descriptive and anecdotal. As a teacher (and on occasion student) continuously and actively involved in online teaching and learning for more than two decades I have never considered the automation of teaching to be a threat.  Indeed, I can envisage how automation (for example, the collection and collation of learning analytics (LA) data) has promise and I would not object to it being considered as co-teaching provided that the automated information and myself were appropriately assembled so that LA information is monitored throughout.  However, I cannot discern any evidence to suggest that botty and the MOOC teaching team are entangled in a way that merits a claim of co-teaching or that this initiative has informed the scholarship of online teaching in any useful way. Furthermore,  the evidence presents botty as not very accomplished when it comes to recognising and responding to the socio-emotional needs of students – perhaps because it is not human.

1.         Laurillard, D., Productivity: Achieving higher quality and more effective learning in affrodable and acceptable ways. 2011.

http://www.tlrp.org/docs/ProdBeta.pdf.

Taylor & Francis Group partners with researchers, scholarly societies, universities and libraries worldwide to bring knowledge to life.  As one of the world’s leading publishers of scholarly journals, books, ebooks and reference works our content spans all areas of Humanities, Social Sciences, Behavioural Sciences, Science, and Technology and Medicine.   From our network of offices in Oxford, New York, Philadelphia, Boca Raton, Boston, Melbourne, Singapore, Beijing, Tokyo, Stockholm, New Delhi and Johannesburg, Taylor & Francis staff provide local expertise and support to our editors, societies and authors and tailored, efficient customer service to our library colleagues.

When myths about the lack of embodiment online get translated to conclusions about student science misconceptions

The Institute for effective evidence (IEE) http://www.york.ac.uk/iee

is an influential filter of educational research providing ‘rigorous evaluations of programmes and practices’. It is why it is disappointing that a recent report from them on this article (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tea.21169/abstract

in the Journal of Science Teaching by Wendt and Rockinson-Szapkiw was notable for its lack of evaluation. The research had looked at learning outcomes (with a focus on student misconceptions about science) when instruction in class is followed by group work. The interpersonal interactions required for group work took place either face-to-face (control condition) or were enabled through computer mediated conferencing (CMC)  (the experimental condition). The researchers claim that using CMC for the group work compromised the quality of the learning outcomes; that misconceptions about science tended to persist for students who used this form of communication. The purpose of this blog post is to explain why I think that the discussion and conclusion sections of that research article are misleading.

Wendt and Rockinson-Szapkiw make several references to the lack of embodied communication, behaviours such as pointing, facial expression, as a factor might have influenced the learning outcomes of the students who used CMC for group work. However, it has been demonstrated repeatedly in the research literature that when participants use CMC for group work they adapt by using on a wide range of digital fluency practices for example; metaphor, typography and by appropriating the functionality of the technology for example, threading.  Provided that participants are digitally fluent, they are provided with appropriate facilities, and opportunity for discourse online, the quality of interpersonal interaction for learning should not be compromised by the absence of non-verbal cues.

The key to the success of CMC lies in the design for learning (as is the case for all forms of learning) and it is not a simple case of directly substituting one mode of communication (using CMC) for another (face-to-face). For the research critiqued in this blog entry group work online was presented so that all factors (other than mode of communication) were controlled. It has meant that scholarship of design for this form of learning was ignored and by consequence, professional development for online teaching appears to be lacking. The design did not take into account the constraints (more time is required) of CMC, or capitalize on the affordances. A great advantage of asynchronous discussion is that students can be given the opportunity to reflect and a full textual record of the discussion is available for them to refer to while doing so. The textual record is also available to the teacher whose feedback should be enhanced by access to a full verbal account of the discussion of all the groups involved.  The design did not capitalize on the pedagogic affordances of CMC and when evaluated in this context the conclusion, that CMC is an inferior form of communication for group work, is misleading. The IEE report will amplify the reach of these misleading conclusions and is likely to influence, negatively, the uptake of this form of communication for group work. This is unfortunate given the well-documented advantages that group work online can offer including the potential of Learning Analytics data (which are collected with more granularity and more easily online) for enhancing our understanding of student learning behaviours.