Robot Writers and the Future of Open Education

Robot reporters are already used to develop original stories that cover news, sports, and economic markets. Combining the same algorithmic approaches to sources of open content, we can now imagine a future where authors outline textbooks that are written by robots. This emerging application of artificial intelligence creates opportunities to save time and money while offering new learning experiences through open learning materials that are authored jointly by human and machine. This session will explore an automated book creation platform developed at Penn State to leverage intelligent algorithms that explore OER repositories and return relevant resources that can be combined, remixed, and reused to support specific learning goals. Information gathered from initial experiments, including student reactions, will also be discussed.