A Step Towards Adaptive Online Learning: Exploring the Role of GPT as Virtual Teaching Assistants in Online Education

As student learning transitions to being increasingly 24/7, online courses struggle to provide support for learners on the same schedule. Human TAs are bound by time constraints and are often available only during limited working hours. This can result in a wait time for students seeking answers to their coursework questions. This paper introduces a novel approach to address this need by developing a Virtual Teaching Assistant (TA) that leverages OpenAI’s text embeddings to format and search for data and GPT to adapt the style and content of its responses to align with the typical discourse found in a discussion forum. Our virtual TA, JeepyTA, offers round-the-clock assistance to students, much more rapidly addressing their academic queries. Although still limited in what it can respond to, JeepyTA provides students with responses to their logistic, conceptual, and programming questions, tailored to specific courses. In this paper, we outline the development process, discuss the results, and outline our future plans for a more generalized and versatile Virtual TA catering to a broader range of courses and their differing learning support needs.