Teacher Moments: A digital clinical simulation platform with extensible AI architecture

Abstract

Teacher Moments is an open source platform that allows the authoring of simulations used for education which we recently revised to integrate intelligent coaching agents. The initial simulation development for Teacher Moments focused on teacher education, but the platform is actively used for professional development with nurses, psychologists, police officers, judges, and attorneys. Simulations can range in complexity from single-user simulations to multi-user role-play simulations. Single-user simulations provide opportunities for participants to respond using text or audio inputs while multiuser simulations extend those response types to include chat functionality. To support participant learning, Teacher Moments simulations can now be configured to include intelligent coaching agents that review participant inputs, identify salient patterns in text or speech, and respond with feedback and coaching supports. Teacher Moments can be configured to incorporate text or audio binary classifiers or include conversational agents into the chat feature. Once a classifier is configured there is functionality to dynamically display content based on audio or text classification when authoring the simulation. In addition, conversational agents can interject comments into the chat directed at either a particular participant or to all participants in a chat. Finally, there is a new integrated labeling component that supports collecting binary labels from participants for text or audio data, which can be used either to validate the accuracy of a classifier or to establish training data for a classifier. In this demo, we will: 1) highlight GitHub repositories designed to support the deployment of classifiers that can be integrated into Teacher Moments; 2) demonstrate a conversational agent integrated into the chat feature to provide intelligent supports; 3) illustrate how binary classification can trigger the dynamic display of content providing options for dynamic learning supports; and 4) demonstrate how the labeling component can be used for either validation of a classifier or collection of training data.

Digital clinical simulations to to promote equity mindsets: Insights from a staggered randomized experiment in an online course

“…Teacher Moments, a web-based application that is designed to develop simulations for teaching [17]. In the simulation, participants play the role of 7th grade ELA (English Language Arts) teachers of an outgoing, but struggling student named Jeremy Green (Figure 1).…”

“…2 Blinded scenario and prompt participants to make improvisational instructional decisions at key moments in the scenario [13,17,18]. Responses are made using natural oral language or text responses.…”

“…In our previous work, we explored whether digital clinical simulations could be successfully implemented within a large-scale learning environment-an 8-week online course on equity issues in education that included four digital clinical simulations that were created in the Teacher Moments simulation platform [17]. The course included short documentary-style videos of other educators debriefing the scenario in-person.…”

Board 360: Practicing Facilitating STEM Discussions: A Study on the Use of a Digital Simulation Tool for Teachers

“…Currently, Teacher Moments is used to teach discussion skills in several sites, including undergraduate teacher preparation lectures and community-based teacher preparation programs. As the next step in Teacher Moments, we are also developing natural language processing systems that allow participants to receive real time feedback based on their text or audio responses [9]- [11]. In our simulations on preparing teachers to facilitate argument based scientific reasoning, this type of system could be useful by providing personalized assistance to participants and for modeling more reactive and realistic types of student dialogue.…”