Would you know if one of your Teaching Assistants was a bot? – CognitiveBusiness

Online learning is becoming the norm in universities across the globe, bringing sweeping changes to the way we learn. But earlier this year on online graduate class at Georgia Tech took things a stage further. "Our Teaching Assistants are getting bogged down answering routine questions," said Ashok Goel, who teaches a graduate science course. Students in the class typically post 10,000 messages a semester on the Piazza forum for the course, many of which are either variations on a theme or simple logistical questions. To address this problem, Ashok turned to IBM Watson to create a virtual TA called Jill Watson who was trained on 40,000 posts and released to the wild on the live forum in March as an addition to the other eight TAs.