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Chatbots in the Classroom: Education Innovation Research

7th June 2017 by Martin Chorley

The Computational and Data Journalism team has recently been awarded research funding from the University Centre for Education Innovation to investigate the use of chatbots in the classroom.

The project “proposes the development of chat bots as part of the teaching and learning team to support learning and automate everyday issues to alleviate staff workload.

“This would essentially create an on-demand classroom assistant who can provide informational support whatever schedule students choose to keep outside of the classroom environment and increase their overall satisfaction levels as a result.”

We’ve just hired a 3rd year Computer Science student, Stuart Clark to work with us on the project, and he has started swiftly, working to identify sources of data within the university that such a system can plug into, designing system architectures and interfaces, and beginning work on the implementation.

We’ll follow up this development work over the summer with a live trial of the system in Autumn to see how well it works and assess whether this sort of technology can be successfully used by students and lecturers alike to improve information flow and ease administrative pressures.

We’ll continue to blog about the project as it progresses over the next few months.

Filed Under: Blog, Research, Teaching, The Lab Tagged With: ai, chatbot, coding, data, education, education innovation, interaction, oss, students, summer project, tools

Scraping the Assembly

2nd November 2016 by Martin Chorley

Glyn is currently teaching the first-semester module on Data Journalism. As part of this, students need to complete a data investigation project. One of the students is looking at the expenses of Welsh Assembly Members. These are all freely available online, but not in an easy to manipulate form. According to the Assembly they’d be happy to give the data out as a spreadsheet, if we submitted an FOI.

To me, this seems quite stupid. The information is all online and freely accessible. You’ve admitted you’re willing to give it out to anyone who submits an FOI. So why not just make the raw data available to download? This does not sound like a helpful Open Government to me. Anyway, for whatever reason, they’ve chosen not to, and we can’t be bothered to wait around for an FOI to come back. It’s much quicker and easier to build a scraper! We’ll just use selenium to drive a web browser, submit a search, page through all the results collecting the details, then dump it all out to csv. Simple.

Scraping the Assembly

I built this as a quick hack this morning. It took about an hour or so, and it shows. The code is not robust in any way, but it works. You can ask it for data from any year (or a number of years) and it’ll happily sit there churning its way through the results and spitting them out as both .csv and .json.

All the code is available on Github and it’s under an MIT Licence. Have fun 😉

Filed Under: Blog, Teaching Tagged With: coding, data, foi, investigation, oss, python, scraping

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