The increasing use of technology in everyday life is changing the way students learn and absorb information. It is because of artificial intelligence that the educators today are able to provide a personalized learning environment to the students. The researchers have developed systems that can automatically detect whether students are able to understand the study material or not. Chatbots or artificially intelligent conversational tools, built to improve student interaction and collaboration, are acting as a game changer in the innovative ed-tech world. This article discusses 7 ways in which artificial intelligence and chatbots are influencing the education.
Learning Through Chatbots
A popular application of artificial intelligence is intelligent tutoring systems that provide a personalized learning environment to the students by analyzing their responses and how they go through the learning content. Similarly, chatbots with artificial intelligence technology can be used to teach the students by turning a lecture in a series of messages to make it look like a standardized chat conversation. The bot may repeatedly assess the level of understanding of the student and present the next part of the lecture accordingly.
Botsify is an education chatbot that works in a similar pattern. It presents a specific topic to the students in the form of text, images, videos or a combination of these. After learning the topic, students take quizzes and submit the results to their teachers. In this way, the teachers can easily monitor the students’ performances as well.
2. Enhanced Student Engagement
The students nowadays are already accustomed to the instant messaging platforms and social media. Whether they want to communicate with each other, research topics or find the best assignment help, they switch to these platforms or use a virtual assistant to do so. This can be used to enhance the learning process and engagement of students in a subject. Imagine messaging being used by teachers and students to connect to the classroom, departments, alumni groups, and various activity clubs. It would become so easy for the students to find information about the assignments, due dates or any other important events.
CourseQ is a chatbot that is created to help the students, college groups, and teachers by providing them an easy platform to communicate. The college group can use it to broadcast messages and answer students’ queries. The students can use it to ask questions from the class and the teachers can use it to communicate with the students, ask questions and solve their doubts.
3. Smart & Secure Feedbacks
Feedback, whether it is for the student or teacher, is very important to improve the learning process. The students’ feedback gives an opportunity for the teachers to identify gaps in their teaching efforts and do better. The teachers’ feedback allows the students to identify the areas where they need to do some extra work. The teachers can easily provide the feedback to the students along with assignments, assessments, and tests. For students’ feedback, the educational institutions generally use online to printed forms.
But this process can become more engaging and authentic with chatbots. An artificial intelligence-driven chatbot, Hubert, is bringing this change. The bot interacts with students and asks questions like how the course can be improved, what should be changed, what is working well and what is not. This allows the students to explain themselves freely. The bot then analyzes the feedback, compiles the highlighted points mentioned by most of the students, and send it to the teachers.
Ensuring the security of student data is a responsibility that goes with student record-keeping. So, it is important to keep such data secure and uncompromised through VPN software.
4. Efficient Teaching Assistants
Students often put ‘do my assignment requests’ over the internet so that they can find someone to assist them in completing the assignments and clearing the doubts regarding it. Similarly, our modern day teachers also require assistance to simplify the hectic schedules. Nowadays, bots are being used as virtual teaching assistants to do the repetitive tasks of the teachers.
The bots are used to answer the students’ queries about the course module, lesson plans, assignments, and deadlines. They can monitor the learning progress of the students. They can provide a personalized feedback to the students. They can analyze the students learning needs and recommend the learning content to them accordingly. SnatchBot is one such education chatbot that can be used by teachers to aid their teaching.
5. Instant Help to Students
This is a generation of people who never stop. Technology has enabled the students to get everything instantly. Whether it is sending an email, posting a picture, searching a place or even finding online assignment help, everything can be done in just a few clicks. Hence, the educational institutions also need to speed up their student communication process to draw the attention of this fast-paced generation.
Every year a huge amount of prospective students visit the college websites or administration offices to inquire about the admission process, scholarships or course fees. Since most questions are repetitive, chatbots can be used to convert this time-consuming task of replying to each query personally into an automatic one.
This would not only save a great deal of time of the students but would also diminish the burden of the institutions. Moreover, the students would not have to wait for getting the reply and can participate in instant chats with these bots.
6. Better Student Support
The responsibility of an educational institution doesn’t end at providing a highly-qualified faculty, well-equipped labs or better courses. It has been found that a poor student support is one of the key reasons why students drop out of colleges. Hence, the higher education institutions should always pay attention in providing the complete information to the students and in communicating with them time-to-time.
Chatbots can offer a huge value here. The chatbots that help the students during the admission processes can further be used to provide them all the necessary information about their courses, its modules, and faculties. The bots can also act as campus guides and help the students as they arrive at the campus. They can help the students find out more about the scholarships, hostel facilities, library memberships, and so on.
7. Up-to-date information for the Institutions
Chatbots can be used beyond facilitating the students’ requests. As the students interact with the chatbots, the bot collects a lot of data. This data includes all the information about students’ preferences and their behavior on the information that they can or cannot find on the website.
The institution can utilize this data to track the students’ queries and then identify the areas where they need to improve. For example, they can find if they need to improve the interface of their website or if they should add a new web page regarding a separate topic. The institution can repeat this process at regular intervals and then transform accordingly with the changing needs and preferences of the students.