AI-assisted virtual teachers coming, are you ready?

The time has come for Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven teaching assistants to help ease a human teacher's workload in the age of online learning, however, such virtual machines have to be effective and communicate well to be accepted by the society in a broad way, argue researchers. The increase in online education has allowed a new type of teacher to emerge -- an artificial one. But just how accepting students are of an artificial instructor remains to be seen, said researchers at the University of Central Florida's Nicholson School of Communication and Media who are working to examine student perceptions of AI-based teachers. Some of their findings, published in the'International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction', indicated that for students to accept an AI teaching assistant, it needs to be effective and easy to talk to. "The hope is that by understanding how students relate to AI-teachers, engineers and computer scientists can design them to easily integrate into the education experience," said Jihyun Kim, an associate professor in the school and lead author of the study.