Bot Building Steps
Photo by Amber Case
2.Create a list of frequently asked questions
3.Test
4.Student review
5.Launch
5.Launch
Building on the achievements of the innovative
chatbots created at Georgia Tech and Georgia State University, the faculty and staff at Brock University’s Centre for Adult Education
sought to use the Microsoft Bot Framework to create
a bot that would support student success in an online undergraduate degree
program.
With the goal of providing
students with a means to be able to quickly and efficiently get answers to the
questions they may have at any time during the night or day, the program began
to develop a list of frequently asked questions. The experiment at Georgia Tech
noted that many of the questions that students ask are routine and are usually
related to readily available information (Korn, 2016). With this in mind, the student
success bot created at Brock University
simply provided answers to common questions and included a link to the webpage
where the answer was located. This enabled students to easily and quickly find
the answer to their question without having to click
through numerous pages of the university’s often, difficult to navigate
website. Being able to make anonymous inquiries also allowed students to save
face and avoid feeling trivial. Students
that used the Georgia State bot noted that they didn’t feel judged for asking
what might seem like a “stupid” question. They also appreciated the
instantaneous responses, especially when they asked questions at all hours of
the night (Herndon, 2017).
Instead of having one person create the bot, a collaborative approach
was used to develop the knowledge base that powered the Brock chatbot. This inclusive approach provided the faculty
and staff with the opportunity to discuss potential student questions and then
consider the answers, as well as to create proactive solutions to common student
problems. This resulted in a collaborative
professional development opportunity while also serving to develop a comprehensive listing of student services and
advising resources that could be used to support individual staff or faculty knowledge
development.
The use of Microsoft Office 365 facilitated a collaborative and dynamic
process by allowing all contributors to provide their insight into the content
and context of the types of questions that were to be included in the knowledge base. The knowledge base was created
using an Office 365 Word file that allowed all faculty and staff members to contribute
to and edit the content. Sharing access to the
bot knowledge base, question log and analytics
also serves foster a collaborative
approach to the maintenance and review of the bot data. The ability for multiple people to access this data can foster
further discussions regarding the when and why students are asking specific
questions.
Further Reading:
- Goel, A. K., & Polepeddi, L. (2016). Jill Watson: A Virtual Teaching Assistant for Online Education (Technical Report). Georgia Institute of Technology. Retrieved from https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/59104
- Gose, B. (2016, October 23). When the Teaching Assistant Is a Robot. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from https://www.chronicle.com/article/When-the-Teaching-Assistant-Is/238114
- Herndon, C. (2017, March 6). Case Study: How Georgia State University supports every student with personalized text messaging. Retrieved from http://blog.admithub.com/case-study-how-admithub-is-freezing-summer-melt-at-georgia-state-university
- Maderer, J. (2017, January 9). Jill Watson, Round Three. Retrieved from http://www.news.gatech.edu/2017/01/09/jill-watson-round-three
- Ravipati, S. (2017, March 3). Using AI Chatbots to Freeze ‘Summer Melt’ in Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://campustechnology.com/Articles/2017/03/07/Using-AI-Chatbots-to-Freeze-Summer-Melt-in-Higher-Ed.aspx
Links
• Microsoft Bot Framework https://dev.botframework.com/
• Microsoft QnA Maker https://qnamaker.ai/
Flickr Photo by Amber Case
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