Heron — Virtual TA Slackbot
Pedagogy infrastructure: a Slackbot that serves as a 24/7 virtual teaching assistant for course use.
Heron is a virtual TA Slackbot for law school courses. Backed by retrieval over course materials — syllabus, readings, lecture transcripts — Heron answers student questions, points to relevant materials, and escalates to faculty when something needs human judgment.
Why this matters
A first-line TA available at 3am the night before an exam, in office-hours queue when the human TAs are saturated, in study-group conversations when no one’s quite sure of the answer. Pedagogy infrastructure: students learn from interacting with Heron; faculty save synchronous-TA bandwidth for higher-leverage work.
Status
v1 prototype lives at ~/code/ip_slackbot — built around an IP-class corpus and used to validate the retrieval pattern. Lab-owned v2 is the next major build, scoped to generalize the architecture across courses.