BY SOPHIA STUART, PC Magazine
A MOOC out of The University of Edinburgh will experiment with Twitter bots. For those of us who can’t quite afford to go back to school, services like Coursera offer free online classes in everything from languages and chemistry to nutrition and law. One such session is the E-learning and Digital Cultures class, which will be led by Dr. Jeremy Knox, a Lecturer for the MSc in Digital Education program at The University of Edinburgh. Knox’s background is in teaching, special education needs, and software design. For this year’s course we wanted to see if it was possible to automate some of the process, so we’ve developed an artificially intelligent bot – within Twitter – to attempt to answer students’ FAQs. It’s something of a move towards robot teaching, in a way. Its intelligence is limited right now, but it raises a question – can we consider automation as a fully fledged teaching tool?”