One-Third Of Cloud Collective At UNSW-AUS

Question Bot Helps Students in Adapting to Challenges

Microsoft teams at the University of New South Wales in Australia have joined with a local senior lecturer to create a way to help people navigate their higher education.

Using AI they have written a program that they call Question Bot. It is a gem of machine learning collaboration and communication with over 17,000 engineering students at UNSW.

Students can ask questions of the bot about nearly anything having to do with their education. According to Dave Kellerman,“I use QnA Maker, a Cognitive Service on Azure, to train the AI of the bot,” said Kellerman. “Within a couple of weeks, it started answering questions on its own. But not just that, Question Bot was also able to direct the students back to the conversations where their peers had talked about similar problems. That’s reconnecting people and building learning communities.”

The administrators have been able to identify those students who are at risk of dropping out so that they can take the steps needed to keep the student going in a positive direction in education.. The data from the platform informs Kellermann of the early warning signs, such as a sudden slip in marks or reduced engagement with the bot.

“QBot was now able to answer the questions directly or track the person who had asked the question and make sure they were notified once the correct answer had been provided.”

QuestionBot was able to direct the students back to the conversations where their peers had talked about similar problems.

Kellerman gives a lot of credit is being given to Cloud Collective and  in particular Antares, for putting the program together in about 18 months. Dr. Kellermann shared a stage with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at Microsoft’s Inspire 2019 event in Las Vegas, to reveal how Teams and AI are transforming learning at UNSW Sydney and setting a new high watermark for student support, according to technologyrecord.com.

Cloud Collective is an alliance of three Microsoft Gold Partners – Antares Solutions, Modality and Quorum.

read more at technologyrecord.com