Campus digital assistants
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A presentation at Connect More in England (Manchester), 27 June 2019. Speaker: Aftab Hussain Strategic ILT Leader, Bolton College. Hear how Ada, a digital assistant powered by artificial intelligence (AI), has enabled Bolton College to provide personalised and contextualised one-to-one support for every student on the campus. Beacon assessors describe Ada as “potentially a game changer for the whole of the FE sector.
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Campus digital assistants
- 1. How do we deliver campus services if every student and teacher has access to a digital assistant? Campus Digital Assistants: The Future is Conversational
- 2. What makes for Calm Technology? It informs but doesn't demand our focus or attention. It doesn’t burden students and teachers with too much information. It makes the complex simple. It creates a sense of familiarity. It has an awareness of the student’s or teacher’s surroundings in the past, present and future. Because technology comes to be everywhere, it disappears. Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown: Designing Calm Technology (1995)
- 3. Students and teachers do not operate the computer. They communicate with it to accomplish a task. Thus we are creating a new arena of human action: communication with machines rather than operation of machines. Douglas Engelbart (1962)
- 4. Calm Technology manifests itself through the use of campus digital assistants. #VoiceFirst
- 5. Ada, Bolton College’s digital assistant has been supporting students with day-to-day enquiries since April 2017.
- 6. Ada answers questions on behalf of all the teachers and support teams across the College.
- 7. #VoiceFirst and conversational services change the way we deliver services to our students and staff.
- 8. Bolton College’s digital assistant delivers contextualised responses to students and teachers across all devices.
- 9. Adaptive Learning Environments Subject Specific Bots UCAS Well Being Students at Risk Careers Personnel Student Records Automatic Marking Revision Bots Admissions Timetables Professional Development Parental Engagement Library Bots Exam Bots Admissions
- 10. The chatbot is connected to all key datasets on the campus. It responds contextually to student and teacher enquiries across all modalities. The digital assistant helps students, teachers and support teams with a wide range of day-to-day activities and workflows. The digital assistant conducts itself with increasing autonomy as underlying machine learning models and intelligence process automation improve its ability to support everyone on the campus. The evolution of the campus digital assistant STAGE 1 STAGE 2 STAGE 3
- 11. It’s time to change our perceptions of EdTech services.
- 12. The introduction of conversational services is changing how we interact with campus services.
- 13. Digital assistants like Ada at Bolton College are part of a much larger suite of cognitive services that are beginning to shape the education sector. Adaptive Learning and Assessment Automated Student Reports Automatic Marking and Feedback Nudges Students at Risk Conversational Tutorials RPA and IPA
- 14. Ethics The emergence of campus digital assistants brings about various ethical issues around privacy, data security, algorithmic authority, agency, transparency, accountability and more.
- 15. Where are we going with our campus digital assistants?
- 16. The EdTech sector is able to build multiple services that add to the cognitive abilities of campus digital assistants. Campus digital assistants A new EdTech category
- 17. Every EdTech service will be cognitive or linked to a campus digital assistant.
- 18. Every student and teacher will be supported by multiple agents that perform narrow and discrete tasks .
- 19. #EdTechUK goal: Every student and teacher is supported by a campus digital assistant.
Editor's Notes
- Introduction slide: If every student, teacher and member of the support team on a modern campus had access to a digital assistant it changes everything that happens within that campus. My dream is that every student and teacher will have access to a campus digital assistant. Colleagues and I at Bolton College started on that journey in April 2017.
- Calm Technology manifests itself through conversational services and campus digital assistants. #VoiceFirst
- Ask Ada slide: MODALITY 1: Desktop and Web Introduce the Ada service – describe what she is designed to do. The service can answer over 2,500 questions about the campus and its services. Over 80,000 questions have been answered by Ada since the launch of the service.
- Ask Ada slide: MODALITY 1: Desktop and Web Introduce the Ada service – describe what she is designed to do. The service can answer over 2,500 questions about the campus and its services. Over 80,000 questions have been answered by Ada since the launch of the service.
- Amazon smart speaker slide: MODALITY 2 and 3: Voice Only – smartphones and smart speakers Our students and teachers can access Bolton College’s Alexa Skill across multiple Echo smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo, Echo Plus, Dot, Show and Spot. We are talking to networked devices and services.
- Context slide: Without context, an education campus can’t realise a digital assistant. Student and teachers can also authenticate to Bolton College’s Alexa Skill. This is important because it means that Alexa can reply with personalised and contextualised responses to the person who makes the enquiry. Notes on next slide: So how do we design a digital assistant to support our students and teachers across all these modalities?
- Component parts of the Ada service
- Evolution of the campus digital assistant The number and variety of tasks that the digital assistant will be able to support will be very varied: Everything from answering day-to-day questions, to marking student work, helping to identify students at risk, answering and making phone calls; and doing your timetables.
- It’s time to change our perceptions of EdTech services Many of the EdTech services haven’t fundamentally changed since they emerged in the 90’s or the 00’s. The emergence of cognitive services is already changing
- Redefining college services slide: Conversational services are changing how we perceive a traditional services such as: learning management systems, management information system or library management systems. It changes how information is distributed and cascaded to students from the college. Legacy web based systems are no longer the primary user interface. It also changes the way students learn and get assessed online. How the service is benefitting teachers: When teachers have their weekly team meetings to discuss student progress they will turn to their Echo Shows and converse with their digital assistant to inform their decision making. They will converse with their Echo Shows to garner information about their students. The Alexa Skill can respond to questions such as: Which of my learners is out on work placement next week? Which of my learners has an attendance lower than 85%? Show me the students who are at risk with their studies and so many more.
- The Bigger Picture slide: Digital assistants like Ada at Bolton College are part of a much larger suite of cognitive services that are beginning to shape the education sector. 1. VOICE FIRST services will become the norm in our schools, colleges and universities. 2. The education sector will start to use services which will enable schools and colleges to generate daily student report cards to everyone on their campus in a few seconds. 3. Managers will never have to author another report. 4. Learners will no longer use legacy interfaces to access campus services. 5. Our students will get grades and feedback for their work in seconds. 6. Timetabling will be done by an algorithm. 7. Teaching – learning and assessment materials will be truly adaptive. 8. Many of the routine tasks and activities on the campus will be done by agents on behalf of students, teachers and support workers on the campus. 9. Certification and accreditation will be managed by blockchain. 10. Ada starts to nudge students 11. AND every student, teacher and support worker in our campuses will be supported by a DIGITAL ASSISTANT.
- A New EdTech category: The advent of the campus digital assistant will be as transformative as the web and mobile.
- The campus digital assistant should be seen as a composite of multiple intelligent agents that inform the behaviour of the campus digital assistant. Eg. Assessment agent, UCAS agent, library agent etc.
- What would the education landscape look like if every student and teacher had access to a digital student to support their studies or work?