It’s 11:45 p.m. and the chemistry homework is due at midnight. It’s too late for a struggling student to attend office hours or get an email response from a professor. But it only takes a few minutes to reach their teaching assistant.
“Why don’t metals burn?” the student asks.
“Great question!” the TA replies, before explaining that some metals, like magnesium, can burn, just not in the ways one might think. “Want to see a demonstration with magnesium?”
“I’d love to!” the student writes back. But, the TA, powered by artificial intelligence, then forgets what it was talking about and instead explains how much can be learned by mixing baking soda and vinegar.
This fall, a small group of professors at Morehouse College will use these TAs, which are actually digital avatars resembling each professor’s physical appearance and demeanor. The chemistry instructor The Chronicle tried out for this story is based on Muhsinah Morris, a Morehouse chemistry professor who is spearheading the project. Proponents hope students will turn to these virtual TAs to answer questions and even deliver some lectures.
Many of the developments in AI’s reshaping of education have pitted tech and academics against each other, with worries that students are turning to machine learning to complete assignments, while some publishers are embracing AI to review professors’ scholarship. Several states are considering legislation that would ban colleges from completely replacing instructors with AI.
Morehouse’s digital TAs, however, join a growing list of products portrayed as building an alliance, in which educators are armed with AI tools. Georgia State University used AI to communicate with students between the admission and enrollment periods to greatly lessen “summer melt.” Southern New Hampshire University is using AI for course design and advising, said a spokesperson. And VictoryXR, the Iowa firm that designed Morehouse’s TAs, has also created AI patients that talk to medical students at Seton Hall University, as well as AI negotiators that wrangle with business students at Indiana University, said Steve Grubbs, the firm’s chief executive.
The AI TA itself isn’t wholly new. Jill Watson, a virtual teaching assistant at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been used by more than 10,000 students since 2016, according to its creator, Ashok Goel, a Georgia Tech computer scientist. Goel has published papers arguing that it “has been shown to improve teaching presence in online education for adult learners.”
But proponents of the new Morehouse TAs say their tech is a step forward. Jill Watson is a simple chatbot; these are “a professor’s digital mini-me,” said Grubbs.
Morehouse, a historically Black men’s college, does not currently have TAs. The new tool can reteach students lessons when they miss class or answer questions whenever they need clarification. Instead of a purely text interface similar to popular chatbots, these TAs exist in digital classrooms, and can use slideshows, images, videos, and elaborate 3-D models in their lessons.
To do that, their “brains” have to be manually loaded by professors for each course, Grubbs said. That information will live in a “walled garden” that the AI turns to first when answering questions.
Uploading the necessary materials took some time, but it was largely duplicative of some professors’ work with digital course-management systems, said Morris, the chemistry professor.
If a student asks an AI TA about something that isn’t in the professor’s information, it will turn to a large language model from OpenAI — the creator of ChatGPT — to craft answers based on outside information. The TA will also attempt to redirect a student who asks a question unrelated to the class content.
“That’s a great question for history class!” Morris’s AI avatar said when The Chronicle asked it about the War of 1812. “Let’s refocus on chemistry. Do you have any questions about atomic structure or the periodic table?”
Morris’s hope is that her avatar will be a “24/7 option” available when she’s not, she said. “If you have a question at three in the morning that you would normally just ask yourself … maybe she’ll get that answer.”
Morris has tested her avatar heavily and said she’s only run into minor typo issues, even with complex chemistry questions. The voice-to-text option was able to easily understand her husband’s Jamaican dialect, she said, and it conversed with her even when she used “texting phrases” popular among her students, like IDK (I don’t know) or IDC (I don’t care).
“It doesn’t care what the syntax is,” she said, and even accurately answers questions about if a chemistry concept “is cap,” a common slang term meaning not true.
In Morris’s classes, there are always some students who “never ask a question the entire year” even as they struggle with the material, she said. The always-available digital version of herself offers those students a low-pressure environment to ask questions, she said, about even seemingly simple things, without fear of embarrassment or wasting class time.
Some early research suggests that interacting with a digital educator “with the knowledge that it’s not a real person frees up students to ask more questions and take more risks,” said Michael Fried, a senior researcher with Ithaka S+R’s Educational Transformation Program.
This isn’t Morehouse’s first venture into computer-generated classrooms. The college was also an early proponent of “metaversities,” digital recreations of campuses and classrooms where students attend classes through virtual-reality headsets. There will still be classes offered in Morehouse’s metaversity this fall, but the hope is that the AI TAs can be a more-accessible counterpart.
“The metaversity was immersive,” Morris said. “But, every student doesn’t have a headset. Everyone has a Chrome browser.”
That accessibility pitch isn’t perfect, said Derek Bruff, former director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching and author of the books Intentional Tech and Teaching with Classroom Response Systems. The Chronicle asked Bruff to try out the TA demo, and he reported that it could be slow to load. If the goal is to give students a better option for out-of-class questions than a Google search, he said, it makes more sense to develop straightforward chatbots that work quickly and on mobile devices.
“Students need to ask good questions and the AI needs to give good answers,” he said. “A lot of the other stuff is just window dressing.”
Don’t underestimate the difficulty of asking those good questions, said Fried, who also tested the demo at The Chronicle’s request. In his experience, the AI TA struggled to recall what it had just said, and so Fried had to summarize previous answers in each question, he said. The art of creating questions that get usable answers from AI — often called “prompt engineering” — will be a “second learning curve not related to chemistry” that students will encounter with these AI TAs that wouldn’t be there with humans.
At one point, The Chronicle asked Morris’s AI avatar, “What if I want a real TA?”
“I understand it can be tough without a real TA, but think of it as a great chance to become more independent in your studies!” it said. “Plus, I’m here to help with any chemistry questions you have. What’s been challenging you in class lately?”
