Several years ago personal assistants moved into the digital world. From this shift we inherited Virtual Assistants (VA). These individuals found ways to market themselves to facilitate tasks for customers who pay for the assistance. VA's can utilize tools to communicate and facilitate tasks. They are usually remote and communicate online.
HUMAN VIRTUAL ASSISTANTS CAN DO SOME OF THE FOLLOWING:
Teacher Assistants (TA) in training instructions, especially college curriculum, fulfill tasks for the teacher to make the experience better for the students, teacher, and overall instruction. Isn't this similar to what a VA does for their client? TA's and VA's do many simple and advanced tasks to free up time for valuable tasks, requiring quality time. Instructors may have multiple teacher assistants, and even have learning assistants. Instruction teams have many tasks to manage. See a video on the left to see an video of how a digital virtual assistant can help a TA. Human virtual assistants can do these tasks sooner than the TA, and have more flexible schedules. They can even do work at 2 a.m.
Adding extra help from a remote person that is flexible is awesome. The challenge is they are not free. See below for some challenges with VA services.
Human virtual assistants are remote people performing tasks for instructors at flexible time periods. Human assistants help various types of clients, but can definitely help with simple and administrative tasks in education programs. They can do similar tasks as TA's and Learning Assistants.
Virtual Assitants cost are usually more than a TA's, not to mention they are only remotely accessible. These challenges make it hard to justify adding virtual assistants to the instruction model. What may make sense is to leverage those values in a VA, but avoid the challenges by deploying a digital virtual assistant. Please continue to the next module to review digital virtual assistants.