Educational
publisher Pearson is partnering with IBM to have the latter’s Watson computer
system tutor students via Pearson’s courseware. Watson will translate questions
students ask through their learning programs and provide explanations,
feedback, and guidance to get past misconceptions.
Instructors
will be able to use data gathered from that process to see what parts of their
courses are generating confusion for students and also identify which students
require additional assistance.
The
partnership between IBM and Pearson will try to replicate and expand upon
an experiment IBM
conducted at the Georgia Institute of Technology last year, where students in a computer-science
course on artificial intelligence had online access to tutoring from a teaching
assistant named “Jill Watson.” Researchers had input all the questions ever
asked in that course’s online discussion forum into the Watson platform. They
wanted to find out if students would discern a difference between human tutors
and a virtual counterpart.
At
first, Jill Watson’s answers were “odd and irrelevant,” but by the end of the
experiment her answers were delivered with ”97% certainty,” according to the
research team. Student response was “uniformly positive” when they were eventually
told the nature of their tutor.
