College Students Had An AI Teaching Assistant, And ...

Goel got the idea to recruit an AI teaching assistant because of the sheer workload he and his graduate students faced every semester. Knowledge Based Artificial Intelligence is a core requirement of Georgia Tech's online master's of computer science program, and as a result, 300 students take it each semester--and rack up around 10,000 messages in the class's online forums. To develop the AI, Goel and his students gathered up every message that had ever been posted in the forums since the class first started, amassing about 40,000 messages in all. Then, they fed the postings to their robo-TA to help her learn the kinds of questions that might be asked and the kind of answers that would be helpful. At first, Jill Watson wasn't able to answer enough questions to be a viable force for good on the message boards.