Promises of ‘teacher-light’ tuition and of enhanced ‘efficiency’ via automation of teaching have been with us since the early days of digital education, sometimes embraced by academics and institutions, and sometimes resisted as a cost-cutting measure which is damaging to teacher professionalism and to the humanistic values of education itself. In this project we re-visited the notion of teacher ‘automation’ from a critical perspective which looks freshly and openly at the idea of the pedagogic ‘automaton’.
The project developed a Twitterbot to help explore new ways of valuing teacher presence which are not resistant to the generative potential of automation. This view sees technological development not as taking place in order to solve a problem, or to address a deficit in teacher ability or productivity, but rather explores how human and non-human teachers might work together in a teaching ‘assemblage’.
We drew on our experience of teaching at massive scale in the Edinburgh Coursera Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) ‘E-learning and digital cultures’, one of the first wave of Edinburgh MOOCs which has now run twice, with total enrolments of 70,000 across three course runs. The project attempted to research and theorise some creative and critical futures for a MOOC pedagogy in which the ‘teacher function’ might become less a question of living teacher presence and more a posthuman mash-up of video, algorithm and automated process.
Key contact: Sian Bayne
Read a news article about the project and an academic article about it in Teaching in Higher Education
