Product Description

My product will be a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform that has built in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that acts as teaching assistants to help students accomplish their learning goals. The platform is usable on multiple devices such as laptop computers, tablets, smartphones, and app integrated in gaming consoles. The course contents will mainly be video based with some activities that will require peripheral software such as a coding integrated development environment, photo editing software, or spreadsheet program. Anyone who has expertise in anything educational is welcome to create a course to upload to our platform. The creation process is made simple by giving instructors course templates and all they need to do is customize instructions and upload videos and activities. The instructors can set the cost of the course after going through a verification process. The verification process will be done by AI to filter out courses that are missing main components such as instructions and videos. After passing the initial stage, the course will be reviewed by our in house course experts to make sure the course contents are worthwhile for any learner. Each course will also be available for review by enrolled students. This will help with filtering out the lower quality courses to make sure the majority of courses on our platform has educational value and is worth enrolling in.

What sets up apart from other MOOC platforms is that we will have an AI chat bot that will act as teaching assistants for all our courses. The instructor will be prompted to put in any common questions about their course into the chat bot and input the answer they would like to give to anyone with those questions. Once this is set up, students that have those questions can get instant answers from our chat bot. Throughout the course, the instructor can customize the chat bot as much as they would like by adding more questions or putting in additional instructions based on student inquiries. The AI chat bot will also be used as a way for the instructor to check in with their learners. The students will have the abilities to turn this function off but this will be a great way to help the learners stay on track and answer any questions they may not voluntarily ask. The check in feature will hopefully keep the students accountable and for them to feel like there is someone helping them in their progress through the course. If there are any issues the chat bot cannot fully address, the students will have the ability to talk to the course instructor instead. The chat bot will schedule an appointment with the instructor and the student can speak to the instructor through the platform’s built in video conferencing software. At the end of a course, the build in AI will help students find another course that will build upon what they learned previously, or something that the student would find interesting to enroll in. These decisions will be made by the aggregated data that was collected throughout the completion of previous courses on the platform. Information such as time spent online, amount of interaction between learner and specific course contents, and search key words are taken into account when recommending further learnings on the platform.

On top of the “teacher” support made possible by the built in AI chat bot, there will also be possibilities of peer interactions on the platform. Every course will have their own forum that all the students of that course can post in. This will be a great area for students to post introductions about themselves and interact with one another to feel like they are a part of a cohort. This forum can be customized by the instructor as well to have designated sections for different topics of discussion and showcasing each other’s work. Instructors can also choose to host annual education fairs or conferences virtually so that the course participants and the instructors can “officially” meet each other and feel more like they belong within the community of learners.

The viability of this venture comes from student retention and improving their engagement and motivation while participating in bite-sized learning. Referring back to the self-determination theory, I believe the platform will meet the three needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness to improve the students’ intrinsic motivation and to prevent the student drop off rate mentioned earlier in the bite-sized learning section. The sense of competence will be met with successful completion of activities throughout the courses. By having more small activities spread out throughout the course and the feedback from our AI chat bot, the students will be able to feel a sense of accomplishment at multiple points of the course and not just at the end. Student autonomy is built into the bite-sized learning model. The students consume the learning contents at anytime and anywhere. The students also control what they want to learn by enrolling only in courses they want to complete. Lastly, relatedness is achieved by connecting with our AI chat bot, the instructor, and the learner’s peers in their corresponding areas of the course. This will make the online learning more of a social environment instead of the students feeling as if they are on their own while participating in online learning.