What if… teachers were replaced with avatars?!
Part of the Bath Digital Festival – FREE EVENT
This hour-long session includes the screening of a new film, The Digital Scholar (2025), and a hosted conversation with the makers: collaborative artists, Kilter, and University of Bath and Bristol researchers.
The Digital Scholar is a 25-minute tongue-in-cheek mockumentary offering a glimpse into a near future vision where photo-real avatars are increasingly deployed as substitutes for human lecturers in the semi-fictional University of Harbridge.
Kilter and members of the ‘Cyber Security Everywhere’ Centre for Doctoral Training working iteratively across 12-months, co-devised a scenario based on contemporary trends & emerging technologies whereby universities could increase income & reduce outgoings by using ‘Digital Scholars’ to replicate expensive, time-limited, fallible organic human counterparts. But at what cost?
The fictional interviews in the film hear from the Harbridge Vice Chancellor as well students, lecturers in Arts & Humanities, local businesses and the newly appointed Digital Scholars themselves, recorded with pioneering avatar-generating platform, Synthesia.io.
The post-screening conversation will welcome questions from the audience on the themes the film raises as well as the technology involved & the ‘making of’ process. Some questions we can anticipate include:
- What does this mean for tuition fees?
- What is the impact on University cities?
- Will knowledge specialisms become hierarchical &/or homogenized?
- Is this the end for international student placements?
- Is this really going to happen?
The Digital Scholar was funded by EPSRC.