Chatbot: an innovative approach towards learning and teaching process in today’s education system.
Poonam Bhatia
Abstract
Artificial intelligence has been appreciated for bringing the ease to human’s life in the form of intelligent agents. These are software that can that can perform task on behalf of users that can range from solving problems to learning new things to making recommendations in various situations. One particular type of agent known as chatbot, offers an attractive ways to communicate with humans behaving as if it understands the human language. Chat bots have been widely used in many industries like entertainment, health, banking to help users but its potential has not been fully utilised in education sector where they can be used as a leaning model by students during their academic year. The task of examining the hypothesis ‘Chat bot can be an innovative approach towards learning and teaching process in today’s education system’ is the main purpose of this dissertation.
As an initiation point, sufficient amount of literature sources were researched to understand the application areas of chat bots along with their effects. The overall efficiency of a chat bot as a mentor was tested through the development of a prototype system. For system evaluation, the framework of the system was based on JAVA concepts where system acts as a JAVA tutor with a view to teach JAVA concepts to students.
The system was tested by using a sample of potential computing students of University of Northampton and the feedback was extracted from the questionnaire that distributed to the participants. It then helped to know user’s point of view on having chat bots as a tool for learning their courses.
This investigation thus, helped in understanding the potential of chat bots as tutors in colleges and universities. They give a new direction to the existing learning and teaching process by its automating various tasks and providing availability 24X7 for guidance which is not possible in today’s pedagogical system.
The University of Northampton's, Department of Computing and Immersive Technologies offers five courses within the MSc Computing postgraduate provision (shown below) all available either part-time or full-time.
