Published on April 23rd, 2018 | by Guest

5 Ways Artificial Intelligence and Chatbots can Influence Education

Over the past few years, Artificial Intelligence and Chatbots have become the latest trends in the technology world. You can find chatbots in almost every industry now, whether it is a travel website, e-commerce platforms, blogs or government sites. The education sector also holds abundant of possibilities for utilizing this incredible technology. The machine learning ability of the chatbots makes them a promising tool for the educators. This article presents you five ways in which artificial intelligence and chatbots can influence the education industry.

1. Personalizing education with artificial intelligence

Chatbots and artificial intelligence have a huge potential in the education industry. They can be used to assist students in learning basic as well as complex subjects with ease. We should understand this fact that every student has different abilities, skill sets, interests, and memorization power. Hence, if students can get a personalized learning environment they will be able to follow their own learning pace and study accordingly.

This personalized tutoring can be provided with the help of chatbots. They can act as virtual advisors for the students, who have the capability to adapt according to the student abilities. The Summit Learning Project uses bots in a similar way. The chatbots communicate with the students and determine the areas where they fall behind. Then, they use this information to create a personalized learning experience for the students. The chatbots also track the students’ progress and guide them throughout the course.

2. Chatbots as teaching assistants

With the help of machine learning and artificial intelligence, chatbots are capable to draw the context from a conversation and reply accordingly, just like human beings. Considering this, Professor Ashok Goel created his teaching assistant Jill Watson. The bot answers students’ questions and provides information about the lectures and the courses.

This is really powerful. Using bots to automate the repetitive tasks of the teachers gives them an opportunity to utilize their energy and time in connecting with the students. They can concentrate on enhancing their teaching methods and improving the curriculum. In fact, teachers can use bots to stay up-to-date about the new evaluation schemes and teaching methods. The teachers would then be able to provide a much interactive classroom environment to the students.

3. Chatbots as administrative assistants

The internet has made it possible for the students to access resources anytime, whether it is online assignment help or campus information. The administrators are an important part of the education sector. After all, they are the ones who take up all the queries of the students, manage the courses and the whole admission process. Chatbots can help them manifold their productivity. They can be used to automate the repetitive tasks of the administrators such as accepting the payments, filling applications, providing information about the college campus, assigning course schedules and so on.

Ivy.ai is one such platform that provides chatbots technology to the universities and educational institutions. The bots can make the information about the campus more accessible to the students as they are available 24/7 for them. Moreover, students can get instant results on everything about the campus and the course. This eases the process of admission and querying for both the students as well as the course administrators. Also, using a bot to answer similar type of students’ questions is way more interactive than static FAQ pages.

4. Chatbots and language learning

Do you want to learn a foreign language? If yes, then drop the idea of getting dictionaries, chatbots today, are here to assist you. This is another significant advantage of artificial intelligence in this era. Today, chatbots have the capability to simulate real-life conversations in different languages. Based on how the students answer the questions, bots have the intelligence to reply accordingly.

Duolingo is a platform that uses bots to help the students practice vocabulary and grammar in different languages. It provides different bots or virtual language tutors and each of them has a different personality, for example, a chef, an officer, and a driver. Students can communicate with the bot in a simple messaging format and learn the language. The bots can also guide the students about the different ways to speak a particular sentence.

5. Feedback surveys with chatbots

The most tedious task to accomplish for the teachers could be taking and assessing the students’ feedback on the courses and the teaching methods. A lot of universities nowadays use online forms to take student feedback but bots can take this to a new level of efficiency. Hubert.ai, a chatbot for the teachers is created with this intention only.

The teachers upload the student’s email addresses. Hubert contacts the students individually via different digital platforms. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to communicate, understand and interpret the student feedback. It then provides the interpretations to the teachers right away by maintaining the student anonymity. In this way, rather than filling forms half-heartedly, students can engage in meaningful conversations. This can result in higher response rates and high-quality feedback from the students.

In this digital age, students are already familiar with messaging platforms. Integrating artificial intelligence and chatbots with education would help the educators connect with the students in better ways. Chatbots can prove to be an extremely efficient and productive tool for the students, teachers, and administrators as well. A lot of redundancy can be diminished and much time can be saved with the chatbots. But, this does not imply that chatbots would replace the educators and the administrators. They would need human expertise and support. What are your experiences with chatbots? Have you used them yet? Please reach out and share your experiences.

Author Bio: Aditya Singhal is the co-founder of Transtutors, a leading Online Education platform for college students. Having graduated from prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) – Delhi, Aditya has a personal interest in helping students.

Tags: AI, artificial intelligence, chatbots, influence