ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces “Teacherbot”, a Twitter bot created for the E-learning and Digital Cultures Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in 2014, and situates it in the context of developments around online teaching at scale and imaginaries of automation in education at that time. It describes what the bot was designed to do, and what it did. Glitchiness was, in the case of the teacherbot, a speculative intervention and the Teacherbot was a speculative object that was able to provoke, invite, include and acknowledge MOOC participants. Its presence and responses to it from teachers and students both opened up and complicated discussions about online education futures and the role of the teacher within them. The chapter traces the development of automated entities in the period since and highlights key questions and considerations that are still very much open when considering the role of automation in learning settings.
