Explaining AI Chatbots
Today many big names are using AI chatbots to improve their customer service and to engage more and more audiences to stay relevant and visible. Apart from business, other sectors are also deploying chatbots including educational institutes and educators.
Chatbot makers utilize artificial intelligence and the latest conversational design to create bots that can communicate with students on all subjects of elementary, secondary, high school and up to university levels. However, AI will not (but may in next 20 something years) replace a student’s favorite teacher but can serve as a helper to the teacher or alternatively, the means of modern education.
Here’s How:
The foreseeable benefits of implementing chatbots to education are far-reaching.
The introduction of AI to classrooms was overshadowed by other businesses, mainly because of the tad-slower adaptability and acceptance of the education industry to newly introduced technology.
But now more and more administrations and teachers are recognizing this cost-effective yet valuable way to keep their students hooked and streamline processes more efficiently.
What helped them most, is the fact that the younger generation is quick to learn and embrace new technology as per the recent trends, we can see a massive move further from single-utility websites and apps to social media and messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook messenger – that do more than just sending and receiving messages.
As Technology Expert Kyla Matthews explains it:
“Kids are growing up with tablets in their hands, so teaching them about new technology and programs will only serve to prepare them for the wider world. Not to mention, technology can make a teacher’s job much easier”
As for the question of how – there are several chatbot building platforms in the market that offer education bots that are designed to engage students and provide short and snappy but valuable information.
These platforms are integrated into Facebook, twitter, skype, and other social media apps to make learning as fun and interesting for the students as possible and at the same time, eliminate the need for dozens of online portals and email accounts to switch in between.
Students can simply interact with the chatbot on their preferred platform and instantly get a response from it!
Cool isn’t?
6 Reasons to have Chatbot for Education Industry
A chatbot is a Medium of Learning
The most useful and sought after application of AI is the automated, intelligent tutoring system that provides a dedicated learning environment to study in and then analyze student’s responses and their patterns of interaction with the artificially intelligent learning content.
Likewise, Artificial intelligent chatbots can help teach students through a series of messages, just like a regular chat conversation, but made out of a lecture.
The chatbot will repeat the cycle of assessing each student’s level of understanding individually and then provide them with the following parts of the lecture as per their progress.
One such platform is Botsify, which has a dedicated chatbot for education. The chatbot can provide specified topics to students through standard text messaging or multimedia such as images, videos, audios, and document files.
Just like any classroom, the chatbot hands them out all learning material required then takes quizzes/tests and submits the results to their teachers. This eases out monitoring student performance and helps speed up the processes.
Chatbot Increases Student Engagement
Students today, are much more exposed to technology than we used to. Instant messages, virtual assistants and social media have become their school hallway, where they exchange not only messages but study materials, help each other with assignments and do their researches through these platforms.
This gives the benefit of enhancing their learning process and increase engagement in individual subjects. Think about messaging apps as a medium of student-teacher communication, just like in the classroom or across the departments, different activity clubs or alumni groups.
Overall, a chatbot will make it easier for the students to get information on their assignments, deadlines and important upcoming events.
Chatbot Provides Smart Feedback
A very important and significant aspect of the learning process is feedback, whether it comes from a student and directed towards the teachers or the other way around.
Feedback helps students in identifying the areas they are lacking and requires efforts and similarly, gives the teacher an opportunity to figure out areas they can improve their teaching abilities as well.
As for submitting their feedback, students usually opt for online or printed forms whereas the teacher gives spontaneous feedback on the test/assessment conducted.
However, this entire process can be made easier and more interesting with a chatbot.
Botsify conversational forms are a great way to collect feedback from students. These forms can be used to take a survey from students such as, how their course could be improved, how did they like the previous lecture or overall quality of their learning experience.
On the other hand, the teacher can provide feedback on the tests or assignments students submitted (also through the forms).
As a bonus, the bot collects all the feedback in one place for the teacher to look at and highlights the most common points mentioned in their feedbacks.
All hail technology!
A chatbot is a Teaching Assistant
Students are often found entering search queries like ‘do my assignment’ to find an assistant who can help them in completing their assignment or to get a clearer explanation of a specific topic they are struggling with.
Teachers also want some optimization to help simplify their everyday tasks to take off the burden of repetitive actions and focus more on providing quality education to their students.
AI Chatbots are virtual teaching assistants that reduce the cycle of tasks aligned for the teacher on a day-to-day base.
These chatbots are designed to answer queries students generally ask like lesson plans, course modules, assignments, and their deadlines.
Can monitor student’s learning progress
Help provide students with personalized feedback individually.
Can recommend students more relevant learning content by analyzing their learning skills and lackings.
Chatbot Provides Students Instant Help
This generation is used to getting everything instantly – whether it’s sending an email, making a purchase, posting a picture or searching for assistance with assignments, it needs to be done in a matter of a few clicks.
Similar to this: Read how to customize a chatbot using multimedia and more here.
To meet up with that, education industry also needs to gear up and provide students with a better communication process with the administration and teachers.
Since the world is filled with millions of prospective students enrolling into colleges and universities across the globe, the number of queries each institution or consultancy receives over its website is humongous. These queries are mostly regarding the admission process, courses, scholarships, fee, etc.
As the queries are mostly repetitive, a chatbot can easily step in and save all the time this task would be taking.
Take a look here, this Botsify chatbot is helping prospective students enroll in a university through a consultancy.
The bot guides each and every student and provides relevant information to them. Their responses are stored for the consultancy to look at and take the procedure further from here.
The best part about chatbots is the quick resolution of problems as well as shortening the cycle of procedures.
Chatbot Provides Better Support to Students
A good educational institute isn’t the one with highly qualified teachers, modern and equipped labs or advanced courses but the one that provides excellent support to their students.
Most of the students that drop out of college due to poor support.
Which means, it is absolutely necessary for every institution to always guide their students thoroughly by giving them timely and accurate information.
But it is nearly impossible to make sure each student is being taken care of fully without any optimization.
A chatbot can help students from their admission processes to class updates to assignment submission deadlines.
Plus, the student can get updates on almost everything. Whether they want information about the upcoming events, scholarships, library memberships, hostel facilities, course modules, a chatbot will always be available to respond to their queries, thus, lowering the number of dropouts who leave for this particular reason.
How Do Chatbots Benefit Education?
AI is helping students in getting what they want!
Every day, thousands of students either search online for some sort of assistance with their assignments or look for quick answers for clarity, regarding the courses they are taking, campus updates, admissions, faculty, etc., etc.,
Similarly, teachers also require some time-saving alternatives to their repetitive processes that undergo all throughout the year.
A chatbot can save the day for both efficiently. No need to manually search for simple answers that the institution can set-up for their chatbot once, and then enjoy for the rest of eternity! And as for the teachers, they can benefit from a chatbot in many ways to simplify their lecturing and evaluation both.
As Deakin’s CIO and Genie Chatbot Head of the Project, William Confalonieri explains it:
“The most promising opportunity to use this technology is to support a much more personalized approach to on-campus services that still appeals to a large crowd” “The system will also help lower the burden on stressed-out faculty, as they no longer have to explain the same things over and over to different students”
Artificial Intelligence assists teachers in more than just grading, it helps them in managing day-to-day tasks, collect student feedback and provide information regarding any updates to their students.
The Best Chatbot for Education?
There are many chatbot building platforms in the market at the moment. However, choosing the most relevant and accurate one for you is important.
Whether you want a chatbot for an institute, a consultancy or a college, the educational chatbot has to be different than a regular B2C chatbot.
Botsify chatbot for Education is dedicated to students, teachers, administrations and the entire education industry across the globe. It can not only help students learn online but teachers can get assistance in the evaluation, grading and student feedback collection.
Our chatbots are designed to engage students with different media to take a break from heavy text-based messages and enjoy some graphically pleasing learning content. This does not only increases the potential to learn quickly but develops an interest in the longer run.
Botsify’s own chatbot responding with multimedia including, text, buttons, slider, and images all in a single message! Once the students finish learning their topics, they can take quizzes like a regular classroom and then submit their results to their teachers.
As for the administration, the most commonly and frequently asked questions from students to the institution can be answers via our chatbot to ease out the cycle and ensure a faster and effective resolution to their problems.
For example, a tech institute created a chatbot for their website using botsify. The main purpose was to help prospective and enrolled students with the latest information, FAQs, campus news, course updates and more.
Take a look here:
As soon as a student clicks ‘Get Started’ the chatbot welcomes and responds to student queries with detailed information. If need be, students can get in touch with a human support representative by clicking ‘Human Help’ in the top menu.
Was The Chatbot of Any Help?
So far, the institute has helped more than 10k students, sent over 40k messages and saved 4+ days worth of support that they would have sent answering to these questions manually.
All this in less than 3 months of the time period!
Chatbot for Education Industry – The Future
Artificially intelligent chatbots do not only facilitate student’s learning process by making it more engaging, short and snappy and interesting but also assist teachers by easing out their teaching processes.
Not only this, but chatbots can also take the workload off of the administrative staff as well.
Simply, AI will result in massive growth for the education industry, benefit the overall teacher-student interaction and improve the classroom environment; apart from enhancing learning, it will make students more tech-savvy and ready to put their foot into the real world!
We need to understand the fact that integrating a chatbot to a classroom will be an essential part of education since the time is running fast and the leap into the education system has been taken by technology years ago.
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