Chatbots In Education: Applications Of Chatbot Technologies

MIT is also heavily invested in AI with its MIT Intelligence Quest (MIT IQ) and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab initiatives, exploring the potential of AI in various fields. The input you provide largely determines the chatbots’ predictive responses. The more context, details, and nuances you give the chatbot the more it has to work with to generate responses. For example, instead of asking “How do I write a course syllabus?”, you might instead say “I am a university instructor developing a new introductory course on genetics.

Education chatbots are interactive artificial intelligence (AI) applications utilized by EdTech companies, universities, schools, and other educational institutions. They serve as virtual assistants, aiding in student instruction, paper assessments, data retrieval for both students and alumni, curriculum updates, and coordinating admission processes. These real-life examples showcase how chatbots are integrated into education and online schools, offering enhanced learning experiences, administrative support, and improved communication. In recent years, chatbots have emerged as powerful tools in various industries, including education.

But during the COVID-19 pandemic, edtech became a true lifeline for education by making it accessible and easy to use despite there being numerous physical restrictions. Today, technologies like conversational AI and natural language processing (NLP) continue to help educators and students world over teach and learn better. Believe it or not, the education sector is now among the top users of chatbots and other smart AI tools like ChatGPT.

This streamlines the student management process and ensures that no potential students slip through the cracks. In this article, we discuss how you can leverage chatbots to improve university enrollments, automate administrative tasks, and personalize student interactions. Hands-on experience using a chatbot can help you to better understand the capabilities and limitations of these tools. Try completing some of the following tasks, or the example educational use cases above, to practice using a chatbot.

Study Limitations

After blocking student access to ChatGPT in February, Walla Walla administrators told me they unblocked it last month and are now embracing A.I. It can provide a new first line of support, supplement support during peak periods, or offload tedious repetitive questions so human agents can focus on more complex issues. Chatbots can help reduce the number of users requiring human assistance, helping businesses more efficient scale up staff to meet increased demand or off-hours requests. Enterprise-grade, self-learning generative AI chatbots built on a conversational AI platform are continually and automatically improving. They employ algorithms that automatically learn from past interactions how best to answer questions and improve conversation flow routing.

Today, chatbots can consistently manage customer interactions 24×7 while continuously improving the quality of the responses and keeping costs down. A chatbot can also eliminate long wait times for phone-based customer support, or even longer wait times for email, chat and web-based support, because they are available immediately to any number of users at once. That’s a great user experience—and satisfied customers are more likely to exhibit brand loyalty. Conversational AI chatbots can remember conversations with users and incorporate this context into their interactions.

It’s the second survey that the foundation has commissioned since last year to find out teachers’ and students’ attitudes toward AI chatbots. As the AI Chatbot is a virtual entity, the student can use the technology free from judgement they may experience when discussing their challenges with another human being, a problem in South Africa and worldwide. UWC wanted to be wiser with their mental health offering, and so introduced a mental health chatbot named Wysa. Free text messaging is tailored to an individual’s needs and guides them through clinically proven interactive cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) exercises.

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Social science research indicates that dialogue represents cultural membership, gender identification, and group membership broadly. How the message is communicated sends a cue of who the message is for and who the speaker is. This subtle intersection of language cues and language identities embeds a message in every dialogical exchange.

The results show that the chatbots were proposed in various areas, including mainly computer science, language, general education, and a few other fields such as engineering and mathematics. Most chatbots are accessible via a web platform, and a fewer chatbots were available on mobile and desktop platforms. This choice can be explained by the flexibility the web platform offers as it potentially supports multiple devices, including laptops, mobile phones, etc.

To sum up, generative AI is enabling online learning providers to deliver a better learning experience for students. In the future, we can expect more providers to introduce AI tools designed to deepen understanding, aid personalized learning, and make learning online more fun. Deep learning capabilities enable AI chatbots to become more accurate over time, which in turn enables humans to interact with AI chatbots in a more natural, free-flowing way without being misunderstood. Additionally, speech technologies emerged as an area requiring substantial improvement, in line with previous results (Jeon et al., 2023). With the exception of Buddy.ai, the voice-based interactions provided very low results due to poor speech recognition and dissatisfaction with the synthesized voice, potentially leading to student anxiety and disengagement. Simultaneously, rendering the AICs’ voice generation more human-like can be attained through more sophisticated Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems that mimic the intonation, rhythm, and stress of natural speech (Jeon et al., 2023).

Every chatbot is different, and depends largely on how much content you put in and how robust a conversation you want to design. As a rule of thumb, it takes one person about a month to make a chatbot with 30 different outputs (ie, types of content you want the user to engage with). With software like DialogFlow, no coding or prior experience is necessary for a basic, text-based build.

Feedback chatbots also afford a more informal, collegial environment for sharing concerns and successes in a course. This can be helpful when asking for feedback about more delicate topics like points of confusion or a sense of belonging. The more informal environment and gradual, directed questioning via turns of conversation can establish a more personable channel through which to share insights. Teachers are asking students to use ChatGPT to generate text on a topic and then getting them to point out the flaws. In one example that a colleague of Stansbury’s shared at her workshop, students used the bot to generate an essay about the history of the printing press. When its US-centric response included no information about the origins of print in Europe or China, the teacher used that as the starting point for a conversation about bias.

1 Research questions

A substantial proportion of users, about 47.26 per cent and 59.1 per cent, respectively, exhibited symptoms indicative of depression and anxiety. This underscores the prevalence and severity of mental health issues among the student population. In terms of engagement patterns on the platform, users on average exchanged 51.33 messages per session and spent 28.19 minutes in a single session, indicating a significant level of interaction and investment in using the platform. AI chatbots can offer support tailored to the student’s needs and challenges.

“It can help you move beyond particular pain points when those pain points aren’t necessarily part of the learning goals of the assignment,” she says. I spoke to a number of teachers and other educators who are now reevaluating what chatbots like ChatGPT mean for how we teach our kids. Far from being just a dream machine for cheaters, many teachers now believe, ChatGPT could actually help make education better.

It was first announced in November 2022 and is available to the general public. ChatGPT’s rival Google Bard chatbot, developed by Google AI, was first announced in May 2023. Both Google Bard and ChatGPT are sizable language model chatbots that undergo training on extensive datasets of text and code. They possess the ability to generate text, create diverse creative content, and provide informative answers to questions, although their accuracy may not always be perfect. The key difference is that Google Bard is trained on a dataset that includes text from the internet, while ChatGPT is trained on a dataset that includes text from books and articles.

They can also assist with campus navigation, providing directions to buildings and facilities. There is also a bias towards empirically evaluated articles as we only selected articles that have an empirical evaluation, such as experiments, evaluation studies, etc. Further, we only analyzed the most recent articles when many articles discussed the same concept by the same researchers. This limitation was necessary to allow us to practically begin the analysis of articles, which took several months. We potentially missed other interesting articles that could be valuable for this study at the date of submission. According to their relevance to our research questions, we evaluated the found articles using the inclusion and exclusion criteria provided in Table 3.

• In fact, some educators think future textbooks could be bundled with chatbots trained on their contents.
• This includes activities such as establishing educational objectives, developing teaching methods and curricula, and conducting assessments (Latif et al., 2023).
• On Tuesday night, I had a long conversation with the chatbot, which revealed (among other things) that it identifies not as Bing but as Sydney, the code name Microsoft gave it during development.
• Frequency in the table refers to the number of observations made in the sample of textual data based on the written assessments provided by participants.
• This, in turn, allows teachers to devote more time and attention to designing exciting lessons and providing learners with the personalized attention they deserve.

Using AI chatbots, educational institutions can provide personalized, accessible, and efficient support services that improve student outcomes and satisfaction. A notable example of a study using questionnaires is ‘Rexy,’ a configurable educational chatbot discussed in (Benedetto & Cremonesi, 2019). The questionnaires elicited feedback from participants and mainly evaluated the effectiveness and usefulness of learning with Rexy. However, a few participants pointed out that it was sufficient for them to learn with a human partner.

LL provided a concise overview of the existing literature and formulated the methodology. All three authors collaborated on the selection of the final paper collection and contributed to crafting the conclusion. Admitting hundreds of students with varied fee structures, course details, and specializations can be a task for administrators. Also, with so many variations, there is a scope for human error in the admission process. We encourage you to organize your colleagues to complete these modules together or facilitate a workshop using our Do-it-yourself Workshop Kits on AI in education. Consider how you might adapt, remix, or enhance these resources for your needs.

Whatever the case or project, here are five best practices and tips for selecting a chatbot platform. It’s important to remember that all chatbots are not created equal and can’t do everything. Several leading universities in the UK, including Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge, issued statements that warned students against using ChatGPT to cheat. Los Angeles Unified, the second-­largest school district in the US, immediately blocked access to OpenAI’s website from its schools’ network.

It excels at capturing and retaining contextual information throughout interactions, leading to more coherent and contextually relevant conversations. Unlike some educational chatbots that follow predetermined paths or rely on predefined scripts, ChatGPT is capable of engaging in open-ended dialogue and adapting to various user inputs. Existing literature review studies attempted to summarize current efforts to apply chatbot technology in education.

Instructors can gather anonymous feedback either on a granular level (eg, regarding a particular class session), or more generally (eg, about the arc of learning over an entire course). More generalized feedback chatbots have the advantage of reuse from session-to-session or year-to-year. Advanced chatbots could be used as powerful classroom aids that make lessons more interactive, teach students media literacy, generate personalized lesson plans, save teachers time on admin, and more.

Authentic learning happens when a person is trying to do or figure out something that they care about — much more so than the problem sets or design challenges that we give them as part of their coursework. It’s in those moments that learners could benefit from a timely piece of advice or feedback, or a suggested “move” or method to try. So I’m currently working on what I call a “cobot” — a hybrid between a rule-based and an NLP bot chatbot — that can collaborate with humans when they need it and as they pursue their own goals. You can picture it as a sidekick in your pocket, one that has been trained at the d.school, has “learned” a large number of design methods, and is always available to offer its knowledge to you. I borrowed the term “proudly artificial” from Lauren Kunze, the CEO of the chatbot platform Pandorabots. It would be unethical to use a chatbot to interact with students under false pretenses.

“First, ChatGPT may help students use writing as a tool for thinking in ways that students currently do not. Many students are not yet fluent enough writers to use the process of writing as a way to discover and clarify their ideas. ChatGPT may address that problem by allowing students to read, reflect, and revise many times without the anguish or frustration that such processes often invoke. This learning concept involves repeating the old lessons, just before you forget them. The spaced interval learning was used as a basis for developing an app that helps people to track the learning process and reminds them to repeat the lessons they are about to forget. The app was created by the Polish inventor Piotr Wozniak and promoted by the SuperMemo company.

For instance, the chatbot presented in (Lee et al., 2020) aims to increase learning effectiveness by allowing students to ask questions related to the course materials. It turned out that most of the participants agreed that the chatbot is a valuable educational tool that facilitates real-time problem solving and provides a quick recap on course material. The study mentioned in (Mendez et al., 2020) conducted two focus groups to evaluate the efficacy of chatbot used for academic advising. While students were largely satisfied with the answers given by the chatbot, they thought it lacked personalization and the human touch of real academic advisors. Finally, the chatbot discussed by (Verleger & Pembridge, 2018) was built upon a Q&A database related to a programming course.

The latest chatbot models have showcased remarkable capabilities in natural language processing and generation. Additional research is required to investigate the role and potential of these newer chatbots in the field of education. Therefore, our paper focuses on reviewing and discussing the findings of these new-generation chatbots’ use in education, including their benefits and challenges from the perspectives of both educators and students. Only four (11.11%) articles used chatbots that engage in user-driven conversations where the user controls the conversation and the chatbot does not have a premade response.

Through interactive conversations, thought-provoking questions, and the delivery of intriguing information, chatbots in education captivate students’ attention, making learning an exciting and rewarding adventure. By creating a sense of connection and personalized interaction, these AI chatbots forge stronger bonds between students and their studies. Learners feel more immersed and invested in their educational journey, driven by the desire to explore new topics and uncover intriguing insights. The application of the CHISM model in the evaluation of four AICs has provided valuable insights into the effectiveness of these tools in language learning. The model, which comprises three dimensions (LEX, DEX, UEX), has allowed for a comprehensive assessment of the AICs across multiple facets.

Juji automatically aggregates and analyzes demographics data and visualizes the summary. So you can get a quick glance on where users came from and when they interacted with the chatbot. Use Juji API to integrate a chatbot with an learning platform or a learning app.

Institutions seeking support in any of these areas can implement chatbots and anticipate remarkable outcomes. From teachers to syllabus, admissions to hygiene, schools can collect information on all the aspects and become champions in their sector. For example, Georgia Tech has created an adaptive learning platform for its computer science master’s program. This platform uses AI to personalize the learning experience for each student. Similarly, Stanford has its own AI Laboratory, where researchers work on cutting-edge AI projects.

By January, school districts across the English-speaking world had started banning the software, from Washington, New York, Alabama, and Virginia in the United States to Queensland and New South Wales in Australia. Faculty from the Stanford Accelerator for Learning are already thinking about the ways in which ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence will change and contribute to education in particular. One of the ways CSUNny has built and maintained a connection with students is by giving it a consistent voice. One professor is the primary writer for CSUNny’s communication so that it’s as relatable as possible.

Guided analysis of how AI can affect your own courses and teaching practice, covering ethical issues, student success issues, and workload balance. We offer this activity for you to self-assess and reflect on what you learned in this module. Begin by telling the chatbot that you would like to develop a fictional short story and that you’d like its assistance in developing your ideas. Try different ways of interacting and responding to the chatbot to get a sense of its capabilities. Go to bard.google.com and sign in with your personal Google account to access Bard.

AI aids researchers in developing systems that can collect student feedback by measuring how much students are able to understand the study material and be attentive during a study session. The way AI technology is booming in every sphere of life, the day when quality education will be more easily accessible is not far. There are multiple business dimensions in the education industry where chatbots are gaining popularity, such as online tutors, student support, teacher’s assistant, administrative tool, assessing and generating results.

User-driven conversations are powered by AI and thus allow for a flexible dialogue as the user chooses the types of questions they ask and thus can deviate from the chatbot’s script. One-way user-driven chatbots use machine learning education chatbot to understand what the user is saying (Dutta, 2017), and the responses are selected from a set of premade answers. In contrast, two-way user-driven chatbots build accurate answers word by word to users (Winkler & Söllner, 2018).

With an AI chatbot, the user can ask, “What’s tomorrow’s weather lookin’ like? With a virtual agent, the user can ask, “What’s tomorrow’s weather lookin’ like? ”—and the virtual agent not only predicts tomorrow’s rain, but also offers to set an earlier alarm to account for rain delays in the morning commute. AtlasRTX provides chatbots, or digital assistants, to colleges and K-12, and recently partnered with Instructure to provide chatbot support for users of the company’s popular Canvas LMS. All conversations are anonymous so no data is tracked to the user and the database only logs the timestamp of each conversation.

It can handle inquiries and provide information even outside regular office hours, ensuring that students’ questions are addressed promptly. This availability enhances student experience and reduces the response time, giving the admissions team a competitive edge. These chatbots contribute to a more efficient and effective assessment process while promoting active student engagement and facilitating personalized learning journeys. Multilingual chatbots act as friendly language ambassadors, breaking down barriers for students from diverse linguistic backgrounds. Their ability to communicate in various languages fosters inclusivity, ensuring that all students can learn and engage effectively, irrespective of their native language.

• Whatever the case or project, here are five best practices and tips for selecting a chatbot platform.
• Firstly, we define the research questions and corresponding search strategies and then we filter the search results based on predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria.
• However, this study contributes more comprehensive evaluation details such as the number of participants, statistical values, findings, etc.
• Use Juji API to integrate a chatbot with an learning platform or a learning app.

And OpenAI has worked with educators to put together a fact sheet about ChatGPT’s potential impact in schools. The company says it also consulted educators when it developed a free tool to spot text written by a chatbot (though its accuracy is limited). “Second, teachers can use the tool as a way of generating many examples and nonexamples of a form or genre. Often, teachers have the resources and bandwidth to find or create one or two models of a particular kind of writing — say, a personal narrative about a family relationship.

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, uses the Generative Pre-training Transformer (GPT) large language model. As of July 2023, it is free to those who sign up for an account using an email address, Google, Microsoft, or Apple account. Keep up with the developing industry and launch the first chatbot on your school website now! By sending questions on various subjects via messaging apps, QuizBot helps students retain information more effectively and prepare for exams in a fun and interactive way.

Repetitive tasks can easily be carried out using chatbots as teachers’ assistants. With artificial intelligence, chatbots can assist teachers in justifying their work without exhausting Chat GPT them too much. This, in turn, allows teachers to devote more time and attention to designing exciting lessons and providing learners with the personalized attention they deserve.

PARRY was a chatbot designed to simulate a paranoid patient with schizophrenia. It engaged in text-based conversations and demonstrated the ability to exhibit delusional behavior, offering insights into natural language processing and AI. Later in 2001 ActiveBuddy, Inc. developed the chatbot SmarterChild that operated on instant messaging platforms such as AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger (Hoffer et al., 2001). SmarterChild was a chatbot that could carry on conversations with users about a variety of topics. It was also able to learn from its interactions with users, which made it more and more sophisticated over time.

The students found the tool helpful and efficient, albeit they wanted more features such as more information about courses and departments. In comparison, 88% of the students in (Daud et al., 2020) found the tool highly useful. Shows that ten (27.77%) articles presented general-purpose educational chatbots that were used in various educational contexts such as online courses (Song et al., 2017; Benedetto & Cremonesi, 2019; Tegos et al., 2020). The approach authors use often relies on a general knowledge base not tied to a specific field. Recently, chatbots have been utilized in various fields (Ramesh et al., 2017).

Most peer agent chatbots allowed students to ask for specific help on demand. Interestingly, the only peer agent that allowed for a free-style conversation was the one described in (Fryer et al., 2017), which could be helpful in the context of learning a language. The teaching agents presented in the different studies used various approaches. For instance, some teaching agents recommended tutorials to students based upon learning styles (Redondo-Hernández & Pérez-Marín, 2011), students’ historical learning (Coronado et al., 2018), and pattern matching (Ondáš et al., 2019).

One of the things that makes GPT-4 so transformative is its ability to understand and formulate freeform questions and prompts in natural language. It facilitates a natural back-and-forth discussion, in other words, exactly like a human conversation – like a conversation between a student and teacher in a physical classroom. In online terms, this capability can be used to ask each student individualized questions, gauge their progress, and prompt deeper learning. Questions like, “What would happen if…?” or “Why did you give that answer?” This helps to ensure that students aren’t just getting the question right but also fully understanding the underlying concepts.

By tailoring their interactions to individual students’ needs and preferences, chatbots offer customized feedback and instructional support, ultimately enhancing student engagement and information retention. However, there are potential difficulties in fully replicating the human educator experience with chatbots. While they can provide customized instruction, chatbots may not match human instructors’ emotional support and mentorship. Understanding the importance of human engagement and expertise in education is crucial. They offer students guidance, motivation, and emotional support—elements that AI cannot completely replicate. The first question identifies the fields of the proposed educational chatbots, while the second question presents the platforms the chatbots operate on, such as web or phone-based platforms.

However, the use of AICs as virtual tutors also presents certain challenges. Some studies have emphasized that interactions with AICs can seem detached and lack the human element (Rapp et al., 2021). Additionally, while AICs can handle a wide range of queries, they may struggle with complex language nuances, which could potentially lead to misunderstandings or incorrect language usage. In terms of the educational role, slightly more than half of the studies used teaching agents, while 13 studies (36.11%) used peer agents. Only two studies presented a teachable agent, and another two studies presented a motivational agent.

Most importantly, chatbots played a critical role in the education field, in which most researchers (12 articles; 33.33%) developed chatbots used to teach computer science topics (Fig. 4). Only four studies (Hwang & Chang, 2021; Wollny et al., 2021; Smutny & Schreiberova, 2020; Winkler & Söllner, 2018) examined the field of application. None of the studies discussed the platforms on which the chatbots run, while only one study (Wollny et al., 2021) analyzed the educational roles the chatbots are playing. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. The study used “teaching,” “assisting,” and “mentoring” as categories for educational roles. This study, however, uses different classifications (e.g., “teaching agent”, “peer agent”, “motivational agent”) supported by the literature in Chhibber and Law (2019), Baylor (2011), and Kerlyl et al. (2006). Other studies such as (Okonkwo and Ade-Ibijola, 2021; Pérez et al., 2020) partially covered this dimension by mentioning that chatbots can be teaching or service-oriented.

Interactive learning chatbots can offer quizzes, exercises, and educational games, providing an engaging learning environment. AI chatbots can be attentive to – and train on – students’ learning habits and areas of difficulty. It has been scientifically proven that not everyone understands and learns in the same way. To cater to the needs of every student in terms of complex topics or subjects, chatbots can customize the learning plan and make sure that students gain maximum knowledge – in the classroom and even outside. When you think of advancements in technology, edtech might not be the first thing that pops into your head.

As technology continues to advance, AI-powered educational chatbots are expected to become more sophisticated, providing accurate information and offering even more individualized and engaging learning experiences. They are anticipated to engage with humans using voice recognition, comprehend human emotions, and navigate social interactions. https://chat.openai.com/ This includes activities such as establishing educational objectives, developing teaching methods and curricula, and conducting assessments (Latif et al., 2023). Considering Microsoft’s extensive integration efforts of ChatGPT into its products (Rudolph et al., 2023; Warren, 2023), it is likely that ChatGPT will become widespread soon.

In the first one you can see that the chatbot is asking the person how they are feeling, and responding differently according to their answer. A scripted chatbot, also called a rule-based chatbot, can engage in conversations by following a decision tree that has been mapped out by the chatbot designer, and follow an if/then logic. In contrast, NLP chatbots, which use Artificial Intelligence, make sense of what the person writes and respond accordingly (NLP stands for Natural Language Processing). Based on my initial explorations of the current capabilities and limitations of both types of chatbots, I opted for scripted chatbots.

Some educational institutions are increasingly turning to AI-powered chatbots, recognizing their relevance, while others are more cautious and do not rush to adopt them in modern educational settings. Consequently, a substantial body of academic literature is dedicated to investigating the role of AI chatbots in education, their potential benefits, and threats. Institutional staff, especially teachers, are often overburdened and exhausted, working beyond their office hours just to deliver excellent learning experiences to their students.

While an AI application such as Wysa can provide much needed support and guidance to a wider audience, they are not substitutes for mental healthcare professionals. They augment counselling services and can provide skills to students that they can self-learn. At the same time, it frees up time and resources for those for whom more traditional and focused forms of support are needed. Chatbot era is beginning, I wanted to ask administrators and educators how their thinking had evolved since last spring. Walla Walla, a district that serves some 5,500 students, seemed like a timely location to begin the conversation.

Remember to read the terms of service of the tool when deciding to access it. Some chatbots have options to opt out of sharing data which are described in the terms of service. As technology continues to evolve, we can expect even more innovative and impactful education chatbot examples in the future. SchoolMessenger, a communication platform for K-12 schools, has introduced a chatbot feature to facilitate parent-teacher communication. Most say their school has no policy on it, is doing nothing to offer desired teacher training, and isn’t meeting the demand of students who would like a career in a job that will need AI, the survey revealed. Apart from rising usage, the majority of surveyed educators, parents, and students believe that AI has a positive impact on education and will be key to future student success.

However, these innovations must be deployed thoughtfully, with a commitment to equity, privacy and ethical considerations. Before they even use ChatGPT, I help students discern what is worth knowing, figuring out how to look it up, and what information or research is worth “outsourcing” to A.I. I also teach students how to think critically about the data collected from the chatbot — what might be missing, what can be improved and how they can expand the “conversation” to get richer feedback. So I jumped at the chance to learn more about how teachers there are planning to use chatbots with their students this academic year. You can read more in my story today about how school districts across the country are repealing their ChatGPT bans. Interestingly, the Khanmigo virtual tutor can also function as a classroom assistant for teachers in traditional education settings.