What happened when I tried learning from a chatbot!

Learning from a bot, a personal experience

In this post I want to give a short review of an online course that I recently completed.  I decided to wait a couple of weeks before writing this because I wanted to reflect on the experience and to see how well I was able to recall the content of the course after a little time had passed.

I am not going to review the content of the course, which was by an academic and writer whom I respect and like, but instead look at the platform (https://dailybitsof.com/) and the idea of using ‘bots’ in education.

This was a short course (14 days) ‘taught’ by a chatbot on Facebook messenger.  To be honest, to say that it was ‘taught’ by a bot is not really true at all, because all that really happened was that an automated message was sent to my Facebook account at a preset time each day with a new ‘lesson’.

When I use the word ‘lesson’, I again need to clarify that the lesson amounted to about five minutes of reading.  There was only text to read, no other media and no questions, discussion or other interaction to check knowledge or understanding or to develop ideas.   So to clarify, what I got was an extended essay that would have taken around an hour to read in one go, cut up into bite sized 5-minute chunks and sent to my Facebook account every afternoon.

When I attempted to interact with the bot by asking questions, it really was not able to respond in any meaningful way except to keep asking me for keywords to recommend another course for me to take, so it was not the best learning experience I have had!

But, it is not all bad – please read until the end!

In the screenshot below, I had just ‘liked’ the lesson I had received – the bot understood that part but then…

As you can see, the bot really was very limited in its ability to respond.   In fact as I write this I am curious to interact with it again to see what happens, hang on, I will be back –

As you can see, that did not really go anywhere.   To be fair the website of the provider does list other courses and they all seem to follow the same format; they are short courses delivered in tiny text packages of 5 minutes of reading on a daily basis, to ‘teach’ soft skills.   This is what they say - 

"Daily Bits Of is a service for people who love learning. People whose curiosity never ends, who see gaining knowledge as an ongoing process and who believe they can acquire any skill they might need to handle work and life’s challenges.

We know that finding time for learning can be difficult. We buy books that pile up, save articles that remain unread and rarely have time for that online course we’ve been longing to take. This is why we created Daily Bits Of as a tool to help people create a daily habit of learning something new."

I feel sure that there are other more advanced systems out there, with better developed bots that have learning algorithms.  In fact I know of one educational project taking place using a bot made by http://www.headai.com/ which looks like it will have better developed bots.  My objective was to simply experience being a student on this type of system.

Being Positive
On the plus side, I did finish the course, which is something positive as I have signed up for very many MOOCs and other free online courses and failed to complete them.  The fact that I knew it would only take 5 minutes or less to read was also a plus, as it overcame my natural tendency to procrastinate.  If I had received the extended essay to read in one sitting, there is a very good chance that it would still be sitting now in a pile of pending reading.

So, the idea of having reading dropped into my ‘stream’,  in small bite sized chunks that I can deal with right away, is not so bad, but is it really learning?   With no discussion, no feedback, no opportunity for questions – the whole thing depends upon the learner being a fully independent autodidact.   

This has been a common criticism of the whole MOOC bubble and much of the open online education movement, the fact that they do not really democratize and open education, but rather that they favour those who already have the skills and knowledge to be independent learners.  This is something that Tressie McMillan Cottom recognized back in 2014 when she coined the phrase “Roaming Autodidact”.

What now?

I am tempted to create a small course myself on the platform and then use that as one small resource for a course that I teach.   So rather than seeing it as a course by itself, I want to see it as a resource that feeds into a bigger learning experience and as a way to try and overcome the resistance that some students have to reading longer texts.   Of course, I could just do that by using programmed emails or messages, there is no need at all for a bot.

To sum up
The experience was interesting and I am glad that I did it.  I think there is some potential in exploring the use of tools that can deliver content to students via alternatives to the darned LMS!

I think I can recall a lot of the content that I read, though it is hard to say with no objective measure.  I feel as if I did learn something though.

I fear that the tool is pandering to our inability to focus on tasks for long periods of time and I worry that we might be discouraging students from the longer periods of effort required for engaging with a difficult text and spending time reading and reflecting on it.    However, it is also true that some reading that appears in a social media stream might be better than no reading at all.

At this point I am still open to the use of bots as a basic tool that can be used to support the delivery of some types of content in certain contexts. I also think that bots might be useful for dealing with routine enquiries about things like submission dates, schedules and so on, but right now I do not fear that I am about to be replaced by a bot as far as my classes are concerned.   That may change, but this experience gave me no real fear of a technological singularity at least on that platform!