Clarkson University Department of Education Chair Catherine Snyder recently served on a panel at IBM’s World of Watson Conference in Las Vegas.

Brian Dempsey, offering manager for IBM’s Watson Education, approached Snyder to share some initial thinking and get feedback on a project for higher education.

Snyder was excited about the project, and offered to continue in a ‘sound board’ role for this and other Watson Education projects going forward, according to a press release from Clarkson.

At the conference, the panel discussion introduced the concept of an IBM Watson software solution that can act as an "intelligent tutor." The solution fits in between a professor and/or graduate teaching assistant and the student.

This intelligent tutor would work with the student on fundamentals of the curriculum, common misconceptions, and basic concepts.

This could free up the professor and TA to tackle more complex ideas, react to the data analytics that Watson can gather while tutoring, and generally make the time spent human-to-human more effective and efficient, the release said.

Snyder remarked that an intelligent tutor powered by Watson would possess three qualities that a human tutor does not:

• It would be infinitely patient.

• It would not be biased.

• It would have infinite time.

Snyder says that the data analytics could be incredible. "If I was, for example, a professor in an introductory psychology class with 60 students, the intelligent tutor could tell me what the most common errors were my students were making, what misconceptions surfaced, etc. That could then allow me to adjust my class for the next day to address these very specific needs. I would no longer have to base my assumptions about student understanding on past classes taught, or anecdotal office hour conversations. I could also dispatch my graduate teaching assistants in more precise ways to meet the needs of the learners in the class,” she said.