My...Robot Teacher? Can AI Avatars Replace Human Teachers?
Jennifer Harmon, PhD
Mixed Methods Research | Survey and Interview Evaluation | Associate Professor
Part 2- The Digital, Human Lecture
Online classes. Convenient and accessible for students. A pain point for professors.
Maybe it’s the extra time needed to prepare online lectures. 2 extra hours per hour long lecture.
And this pain point is felt by younger and older professors, regardless of their tech savvy abilities.
I remember feeling this pain acutely during the pandemic.
When we switched, seemingly overnight, to online instruction, I felt like I was working even more overtime than I ordinarily do. Especially since I was teaching a quasi-studio class with the Adobe Creative Suite, which really did not translate well into the online modality.
In this trial by fire, I had to quickly adapt to the new expectations in the online learning space.
I taught myself Zoom recordings first and then Camtasia, as I found too much background noise in the Zoom recordings I made.
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Now that we are back on campus, I make fewer lecture videos. So, I decided to experiment with fully scripting a lecture video supplement for my Visual Merchandising and Promotion course.
I incorporated Chapter 2 of Fashion Brand Stories- “The Past, Present and Future: A Conceptual Overview,” by Dr. Joseph Henry Hancock II, MS. Ph.D. . This chapter was around double the length of Chapter 1, which I used for the AI avatar video, at 35 pages.
In this video supplement, I followed the same procedure as the video I made with the AI avatar. You can view the video here.
The final product took 90 minutes to write the script, 45 minutes create the slides, 40 minutes to film, 90 minutes to edit the film and 10 minutes to render the video.
For this nearly 10 minute video, it took slightly over 4 and 1/2 hours. In comparison, the AI avatar video took took me 2 hours and 8 minutes to make less than 5 minutes. If you consider the source material was twice as long for this lecture, they are roughly equivalent. Both are far more time consuming that the 60 minutes to make 8 1/2 minutes of brand new lecture material for an unscripted, traditional classroom lecture.
No wonder making lecture videos was part of the reason professors were doing so much overtime during the pandemic!
Now that the videos have been constructed for my course, I'll be asking my students what they think about the them. Stay tuned for part 3!
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8 个月It's a pandora's box. I have 2 comments/points. 1. Making the online video (humanly) is not a "pain point". It is part of teaching and the curriculum. The real pain point is not being paid enough for your time and energy to make this or that the administration demands such from faculty. Let's change things where needed, not by a simple rush to ineffectual, get something up there AI. 2. It's a slippery slope "efficiency" in learning/teaching. I know maybe even a majority of professors will go the next step and just generate the lecture in text through ChatGPT - just put in some headings of what you want disusssed , important learning and then gloss over it once generated. I hope you see where this is heading . Why this is wrong is worthy of its own long post but should be evident to all - taking a technology that works quantitatively to deliver what should be qualitative in design, emphasis - a relationship building exercise. Or why even teach at all?
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1 年I clicked the link to the video in the article. Is that the actual video or the AI video?