Storyline With A Teacher Agent

I think everyone saw the excitement in the news  last year when the new Amazon Echo launched. Along with the interest in these devices, there is a real media inertia towards natural voice interfaced software with the likes of Cortana, Siri and Alexa . So recently I have been playing with the possibilities of integrating agents like these into my Articulate Storyline courses. I think this is an exciting integration that bodes for some revolutionary changes in the way we can teach using computers and the internet. I am starting out my experiments using API.AI  which is a cloud based agent creator, which comes with an enormous base of natural language responses to spoken questions. The API.AI program is a very deep artifcial intelligent response system which can respond with  spoken  answers to  natural language voice recognition of hundreds of questions. It can also be linked to a search engine and work like Cortana to find answers to a student question on the internet. Combined with the Speech API (also from Google),  the Storyline course can now talk with the student asking questions and responding to student answers and questions in  a progressive system through a course outline. I am working to have Storyline triggers integrated so as to also respond to the input from the agent and the student to bring up and move through  slides of videos and quizes and tests.

If anyone is working with these kinds of systems (I believe that Experience Builders has been doing something similar for years on a proprietary platform), I would like to know what kind of subject matter you are applying it to.

I have been looking over my old programmed learning courses to see if they might be expanded to on that form here.

Designing Student Autonomous Learning

The Global Learning XPRIZE has recently been announced. A $15 million dollar contest to develop  open source scalable  teaching software that  operates on a tablet computer both in the cloud and standalone. The children in developing countries using this system should be able to use it alone without a teacher present and at the end of 18 months the child should have learned basic reading, writing and arithmetic.

This is a very ambitious goal indeed. There are some questions about scope of the contest that would be best clarified before judging.

The contest programs would all teach English reading and writing. The contest writing team decided that using English would make it a level playing field for all contestants  rather than judging teaching and instructional programs in many languages.  But will teaching English as a second language really demonstrate progress in illiteracy?  Literacy in a native language should be the target here.

The scope also requires use of specific technology, computer tablets and software. The stated goal is a software/hardware solution. However, there is a pedagogical goal lying at the heart of the quest, whose  solution may be apart from the technological one.

I have not found much research into elementary school  auto didactic approaches that show they work better