Improving Online Learning with Artificial Intelligence | Classroom - EdTech Magazine: Focus on Higher Education

Tommy Peterson, freelance journalist said, Artificial intelligence is gaining traction in classrooms, research labs and physical plants on campus.

Photo: JumpStory

In 2015, Ashok Goel and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology informed a class of students that a new teaching assistant named Jill Watson would be joining their course on artificial intelligence.

They left out an important detail, however: Jill Watson is, herself, an artificial intelligence agent. It wasn’t until late in the term that students started to suspect that the answers to their online queries were not coming from a flesh-and-blood TA. Since then, Jill Watson has participated in 17 classes held both online and in person, at both undergraduate and graduate levels, in subjects ranging from biology to engineering and computer science. Meanwhile, Georgia Tech continues to explore the potential of AI in higher education.
The academic landscape was already being transformed by economics and technology before the massive disruption of COVID-19. AI can play a key part in this new educational reality, says Goel, a professor of computer science and human-centered computing, and director of Georgia Tech’s Design & Intelligence Laboratory...

We want to use AI to build AI,” he says. “We’re working to take Jill Watson to the Georgia Tech level, where it can be used for any class here. Eventually, we want to share the technology with other universities and with high schools.
 
Agent Smith means I could go to a busy middle school teacher and offer her the support of a Jill Watson with the investment of just 10 hours of work.” 
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Source: EdTech Magazine: Focus on Higher Education