He chose Microsoft Teams as the front end of his burgeoning ecosystem and posted a link to it in class. Within 60 seconds students were posting memes in the chat group, and in the weeks that followed participation surged tenfold from the previous system. Students even began answering each other’s questions, rather than relying only on teaching assistants, or TAs. The response to the class satisfaction survey jumped to 99 percent from the typical 75 percent. “The best way to inspire people to become motivated to learn is to create a collective community of people learning together,” Kellermann said. “Teams provided the engagement, and rich communication followed.” Briscoe Kerferd was a demonstrator for Kellermann’s pilot semester running the Teams channel for an introductory course on solid mechanics in 2017. He said he was “mildly annoyed” by the idea of a whole new learning platform, but the system was so streamlined and was accepted so quickly by the students that it simplified and improved his entire experience as a TA. “It was casual, communal and most importantly it was approachable,” Kerferd said. With each TA being responsible for as many as a hundred students, questions invariably got missed in the past, which then dampened pupils’ participation going forward, said Michael Ling, who has been one of Kellermann’s aides for the past few years. That wasn’t acceptable to Kellermann, who Ling described as being “incredibly attentive to his students.” [caption id="attachment_434019" align="alignright" width="600"]

Man sits with hands together and legs crossed in front of orange and green window shades.

David Kellermann created a unique experience for learning – from a Question bot that can answer students’ queries on its own and can find and deliver relevant video clips from past lectures, to a Power BI dashboard that shows how students’ exam answers compare to peers’ and helps build personalized study packs for future tests based on previous performance. (Photo by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures)[/caption] With the Question bot Kellermann developed with Microsoft partner Antares Solutions, students can type a query into a Teams channel, and if the bot doesn’t already have an answer to provide from a previous encounter, it immediately looks up which TA, or tutor, is assigned to that student and tags them to prompt a push notification. “As a student, it's nice to know your question has been seen by the tutor, and you feel happier that you will get a response,” said Annabelle Burns, who was a student in Kellermann’s class and is now one of his TAs. “As a tutor, it's much more efficient than constantly monitoring the forum for questions, and when tagged you can reply promptly and help the students get what they need.” Kellermann also started putting QR codes on all of the learning material and using vision cognitive service so the Question bot could recognize what the student was working on even when pictures of the problems were uploaded to Teams, rather than typed queries. It then searches lecture transcripts on Microsoft Stream and delivers time-stamped video clips to students with any relevant content that might help – even if it’s from classes in previous courses they’ve taken. Kellermann says he uses “everything Microsoft offers.” And when he talks, it’s with a broad understanding of the tech company’s products. “Files are on OneDrive, I record lectures using Stream, and then during the lecture I use digital ink, not a blackboard, and I write it in OneNote Class Notebook, which is shared and synchronized with students so that when I write an X on the board, an X appears on whatever device the students are using,” he said. “All these systems run on Azure, and they’re connected to produce data and telemetry that can be analyzed and modeled to gain insights by using Azure Machine Learning. We integrate all the communication and experience and assets by using AI with the Question bot. It can connect to all the services by using Graph API, and it can access Azure Cognitive Services and connect to info about the people from Microsoft Dynamics 365.” [caption id="attachment_434020" align="alignleft" width="600"]

Man stands at lectern in arena full of thousands of people.

David Kellermann cultivated relationships with various Microsoft developers and product managers to let them know he was “doing something cool” Down Under. That led to a recent invitation to work alongside them at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus for a month, where he was asked to speak at the company's annual Inspire conference for partners. (Photo provided by David Kellermann.)[/caption] Kellermann developed the learning platform on his own, leveraging the university staff’s skill sets to help build it. But along the way, he cultivated relationships with various Microsoft developers and product managers to let them know he was “doing something cool” Down Under. That led to a recent invitation to work alongside them at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus for a month, where Kellermann also was asked to give a demo of his platform in Las Vegas at the company’s annual Inspire conference for partners. In Redmond, he emphasized a focus on integrated solutions for higher education, offered his ideas for product improvements, and stressed how Microsoft, using its broad software stack, has a rare opportunity to solve “the grand challenges” higher education is facing. “Student retention, accessibility, collaboration, personalized learning experiences, digital examinations, the ability to work from anywhere, on or off campus, engaged online learning experiences – all higher ed institutes are trying to address these,” Kellermann said. “Some universities are like major towns, and students live their whole lives on campus for four years,” he said. “Nothing else has that type of ecosystem. And with university being the defining moment in people’s lives, the point at which the trajectory of their life is aimed, it’s the golden opportunity of digital value, of AI being able to help them go into that with as much support, inspiration, knowledge and connectivity as we can.”

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