Improving Online Learning with Artificial Intelligence

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.