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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