Using a chatbot in education

Chatbots are excellently suited as an employee for your customer service. Can a chatbot also do something for you if your ‘customers’ are pupils or students? The answer is yes, because chatbots can be applied perfectly well at schools, and both the student and the organisation benefit from it.

Of course there are different kinds of education, with pupils or students in various age groups. Primary education places different demands on a chatbot than a secondary school, vocational college, university of applied sciences or university. There is therefore no one ready-made chatbot solution: schools are too diverse for that. Chatbot technology is flexible enough, though, to meet the requirements of different educational institutions. Below you will find some examples you could think of.

What time tomorrow?

Pupils have their phone to hand virtually all the time, so sharing knowledge in a digital way is often the first step. Students can check via the chatbot on their mobile what their timetable looks like for tomorrow, when the next test is or their latest test marks.

Secondary schools work with fixed timetables, which a chatbot can handle perfectly well. It learns exactly which subjects a pupil has on Wednesday and can function perfectly well as a diary assistant. Timetables (and school holidays) are often fixed quite far in advance, but a chatbot can also report unexpected timetable changes, if the change is added to the database in good time. In such a case the chatbot can send a push message to a class when the first lesson is cancelled. Farewell, phone tree! In an emergency, cancelled lessons or other problems, the chatbot can send instructions to teachers and students.

Digital planner

A chatbot can also be deployed to make appointments with a mentor, student counsellor or careers adviser. Pupils can check their marks, check when the next test is, which material will be covered in it, and so on. These handy functions work best when this information is entered well in advance, or when someone is on top of the database.

The effectiveness and the user experience depend greatly on accuracy! If a pupil does the wrong homework, after a chatbot has informed them, confidence in the technology takes quite a knock. So it is quite a lot of work to keep the chatbot up to date; if you do it well, it does save pupils and teachers a lot of time.

Cramming

Besides helping with timetable matters, a chatbot can also assist teachers. The British broadcaster BBC has been experimenting for some time with a chatbot that gives you background information on news stories. The step to a chatbot that goes deeper into the lesson material is then not so big. After reading a particular passage the chatbot can give multiple-choice options, with subjects the pupil wants to know more about.

The educational publisher Noordhoff is also looking at the possibilities of chatbots, for example. A virtual assistant can explain and summarise lesson material when a pupil has missed a lesson, or determine where students get stuck in a particular chapter. A well-trained chatbot can even test pupils! Fortunately this does not make teachers redundant, but their role does change. Classroom learning becomes a bit less important, and teachers know exactly where a pupil is getting stuck.

Profit?

Marking homework is not yet possible; artificial intelligence can in principle ‘read’ a piece of work, but is nowhere near smart enough to judge its content. Being able to hold a conversation is one thing; separating main points from side issues, abstract reasoning and assessing sources is still a bit beyond reach. A chatbot can assist excellently with exact subjects, though, by means of practice exercises, or the ‘cramming’ of foreign languages.

Chatbots are being looked at in higher education too. Here the emphasis is on the possibilities for making administrative processes run more efficiently. The Dutch producer of business software UNIT4 integrated a chatbot (WANDA) into its student information system, for example, which lets students change information while chatting.

A school generally has no profit motive. The gain from chatbot use therefore lies in the intangible aspects. The organisation runs more smoothly, and pupils always have important information within reach. These are just some of the ways an educational institution can make smart use of chatbot technology.

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