by Marios Kremantzis, Minhao Zhang and Matthew Higgs
In the anticipation of Blended Learning mode of teaching delivery for the long term, ensuring student engagement in both asynchronous and online synchronous learning activities has been the key for enhancing the student experience in the new era of higher education. After experiencing a challenging academic year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we received feedback about our teaching delivery approaches from students and colleagues that student engagement in the online materials (especially for the asynchronous lectures) is a critical challenge.
Chatbots are intelligent agent technologies automatic software tools that interact with users on a specific topic or in a particular domain in a natural, conversational manner, and mainly using text information. Up to one third of the online interactions involve a chatbot tool and this trend is expected to continue. The use of chatbots has been seen in a wide variety of sectors, including marketing, customer service, technical support, education, training, and medicine. Research has also found that the young generations showed positive perception and acceptance of the use of social networking tools (e.g., the instant messaging application) for teaching and learning. According to the most recent literature, they are more likely to learn new concepts and willingly respond to quizzes when chatbot’s functionality attempts to comply with their personality. Therefore, chatbots demonstrate the ability to create easy-going interactions with the learners. At the same time, the educators can leverage the chatbots system to support engagement, as well as setting out goals, and outcomes of learning and education.
The methodology used in evaluating the project outcomes will also be innovative and robust. In complementing the traditional measures, such as collecting responses via questionnaire, the real time user behaviour data that were tracked by the Chatbot platform can be used as the proxies to identify challenges and opportunities and enhance our understanding toward the students’ learning patterns. Moreover, the robustness of the project will also be ensured by focus group interviews with students through which more observed patterns could be identified. Finally, peer discussion with academic staff will be attempted towards the development of a questionnaire to assess the level of acceptance of Chatbot for education purposes in the wider student population.
The development and evaluation of the chatbot systems could be twofold. Firstly, we would create a Chatbot as a virtual teacher to deliver the teaching contents and combine formative assessments in the conversation flows. We expect to pilot the chatbots in two one-hour asynchronous teaching sessions to replace the recorded lectures. Secondly, we would create a Chatbot as a virtual teaching assistant to support frequently asked questions (FAQs) during the synchronous session. For example, the Chatbot could direct the students to the relevant teaching materials (for example, lecture slides or additional reading materials), live sessions, summative (graded) tasks, troubleshoot for technical issues, and remind students of the learning outcomes and assignment deadlines. In general, the chatbot with such a role will be a way to familiarise students with the layout and content of Blackboard. This could be particularly interesting and relevant for the new first-year students.
The inclusion of Chatbots in the online teaching can significantly contribute to the University’s education priorities. It can not only help to enhance the student experiences in the new BSc and MSc Business Analytics programmes within the School of Management, but also further develop the digital learning infrastructure of the University. On the school level, the proposed project will support the education initiatives in promoting digital innovation and the training and use of a newly introduced educational application. It will, finally, improve the processing of helpdesk requests and facilitate the student-centred learning.