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.

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