2406 07796 Harnessing GenAI for Higher Education: A Study of a Retrieval Augmented Generation Chatbot’s Impact on Human Learning

The adoption of educational chatbots is on the rise due to their ability to provide a cost-effective method to engage students and provide a personalized learning experience (Benotti et al., 2018). Chatbot adoption is especially crucial in online classes that include many students where individual support from educators to students is challenging (Winkler & Söllner, 2018). Moreover, chatbots may interact with students individually (Hobert & Meyer von Wolff, 2019) or support collaborative learning activities (Chaudhuri et al., 2009; Tegos et al., 2014; Kumar & Rose, 2010; Stahl, 2006; Walker et al., 2011). Chatbot interaction is achieved by applying text, speech, graphics, haptics, gestures, and other modes of communication to assist learners in performing educational tasks. While chatbots serve as valuable educational tools, they cannot replace teachers entirely. Instead, they complement educators by automating administrative tasks, providing instant support, and offering personalized learning experiences.

Today, there are many similar partnerships between corporations and educational institutions that try to make the institutional learning transparent and more efficient. In 2016, Bill Gates has announced that the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation will invest more than $240 million dollars in a tech project. Facebook has also followed the Bill Gates’s example and joined the world-famous Summit Learning project. Capacity aims to empower employees with access to information through a user-friendly knowledge base, a suite of app integrations, and a conversational interface.

Lastly, it aims to evaluate their perspectives on the potential advantages and drawbacks of AICs in language learning as future educators. Thanks to these advances, the incorporation of chatbots into language learning applications has been on the rise in recent years (Fryer et al., 2020; Godwin-Jones, 2022; Kohnke, 2023). The wide accessibility of chatbots as virtual language tutors, regardless of temporal and spatial constraints, represents a substantial advantage over human instructors.

Then the motivational agent reacts to the answer with varying emotions, including empathy and approval, to motivate students. Similarly, the chatbot in (Schouten et al., 2017) shows various reactionary emotions and motivates students with encouraging phrases such as “you have already achieved a lot today”. Chatbots have been found to play various roles in educational contexts, which can be divided into four roles (teaching agents, peer agents, teachable agents, and peer agents), with varying degrees of success (Table 6, Fig. 6).

To address this need, our study investigates EFL teacher candidates’ levels of satisfaction and perceptions of four AICs. From the viewpoint of educators, integrating AI chatbots in education brings significant advantages. AI chatbots provide time-saving assistance by handling routine administrative tasks such as scheduling, grading, and providing information to students, allowing educators to focus more on instructional planning and student engagement. Educators can improve their pedagogy by leveraging AI chatbots to augment their instruction and offer personalized support to students. By customizing educational content and generating prompts for open-ended questions aligned with specific learning objectives, teachers can cater to individual student needs and enhance the learning experience.

Teaching agents gave students tutorials or asked them to watch videos with follow-up discussions. Peer agents allowed students to ask for help on demand, for instance, by looking terms up, while teachable agents initiated the conversation with a simple topic, then asked the students questions to learn. Motivational agents reacted to the students’ learning with various emotions, including empathy and approval.

So, artificial intelligence must embed the power of cultural cues in its communicative pathways. Their favorite music is being streamed from distant servers, directly to their smart device. Unfortunately, in many public schools in the United States and internationally, printed textbooks, and lecturing to large groups of students are the only available teaching methods. Thirty years ago, when students wanted a break from study, they would listen to music on cassette players. Alternatively, they would use landline telephones and pagers to arrange dates. Chatbots can inform students about on-campus resources such as library hours, student services, and campus events.

Juji chatbots can also read between the lines to truly understand each student as a unique individual. This enables Juji chatbots to serve as a student’s personal learning assistant or an instructor’s teaching assistant, to personalize teaching and optimize learning outcomes. Around 75 percent in each group of students, teachers and parents report having used AI chatbots either personally, or at school or work, and about half of each group report using AI chatbots once a week or more, according to the new survey. The national survey was conducted from May 7 to 15 by Impact Research for the Walton Family Foundation, the family foundation of Walmart founder Sam Walton.

Cases in which conversational AI supports learners and instructional teams

If needed, the student can connect to a real-time counselling service for additional input, and there is an SOS function connected to the university’s helplines. IBM watsonx Assistant helps organizations provide better customer experiences with an AI chatbot that understands the language of the business, connects to existing customer care systems, and deploys anywhere with enterprise security and scalability. Watsonx Assistant automates repetitive tasks and uses machine learning to resolve customer support issues quickly and efficiently. Any advantage of a chatbot can be a disadvantage if the wrong platform, programming, or data are used.

The inclusion and exclusion criteria allowed us to reduce the number of articles unrelated to our research questions. Further, we excluded tutorials, technical reports, posters, and Ph.D. thesis since they are not peer-reviewed. I should clarify that d.bot — named after its home base, the d.school — is just one member of my bottery (‘bottery’ is a neologism to refer to a group of bots, like a pack of wolves, or a flock of birds).

Can you assist me in developing a useful and clear syllabus for first-year students? Georgia State University developed Pounce, an AI-powered chatbot designed to assist students during the enrollment process. « While negative views of AI have crept up over the last year, students, teachers, and parents feel very positive about it in general, » said the researchers in the report. « On balance they see positive uses for the technology in school, especially if they have used it themselves, » they added.

By leveraging artificial intelligence development solutions, they are transforming the way students learn and interact with educational content.educational content. Scientific studies find that both student engagement and learners’ personality impact students’ online learning experience and outcomes. The challenge is how to engage with each student and deeply personalize their learning experience at scale to boost their learning outcomes.

Enhanced student engagement through chatbot interactions

For the best outcomes, it is important to capture these insights and map them to your CRM to get qualitative insights that help you engage with students better and guide them throughout their journey at university. A higher-education CRM like LeadSquared can integrate with different chatbots, capture that information, and give your counseling teams a one-shot view of the student’s journey so far. The authors declare that this research paper did not receive any funding from external organizations.

Let’s look at how Georgia State uses higher education chatbots to personalize student communication at scale. Pounce was designed to help students by sending timely reminders and relevant information about enrollment tasks, collecting key survey data, and instantly resolving student inquiries on around the clock. A systematic review follows a rigorous methodology, including predefined search criteria and systematic screening processes, to ensure the inclusion of relevant studies. This comprehensive approach ensures that a wide range of research is considered, minimizing the risk of bias and providing a comprehensive overview of the impact of AI in education. Firstly, we define the research questions and corresponding search strategies and then we filter the search results based on predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria.

A chatbot can simulate conversation and idea exchange for low-stakes skills practice. Users can practice language-based soft skills like leading a class discussion, guiding a parent-teacher conference, or even diagnosing English proficiency levels. With a chatbot, users can try out new competencies and hone skills while minimizing the downsides of practicing with a person (eg, judgment, time, repetition).

Subsequently, the assessment of specific topics is presented where the user is expected to fill out values, and the chatbot responds with feedback. The level of the assessment becomes more challenging as the student makes progress. A slightly different interaction is explained in (Winkler et al., 2020), where the chatbot challenges the students with a question. If they answer incorrectly, they are explained why the answer is incorrect and then get asked a scaffolding question. AI chatbots offer a multitude of applications in education, transforming the learning experience. They can act as virtual tutors, providing personalized learning paths and assisting students with queries on academic subjects.

Studies that used questionnaires as a form of evaluation assessed subjective satisfaction, perceived usefulness, and perceived usability, apart from one study that assessed perceived learning (Table 11). Assessing students’ perception of learning and usability is expected as questionnaires ultimately assess participants’ subjective opinions, and thus, they don’t objectively measure metrics education chatbot such as students’ learning. As an example of an evaluation study, the researchers in (Ruan et al., 2019) assessed students’ reactions and behavior while using ‘BookBuddy,’ a chatbot that helps students read books. The researchers recorded the facial expressions of the participants using webcams. It turned out that the students were engaged more than half of the time while using BookBuddy.

However, concerns arise regarding the accuracy of information, fair assessment practices, and ethical considerations. Striking a balance between these advantages and concerns is crucial for responsible integration in education. By harnessing the power of generative AI, chatbots can efficiently handle a multitude of conversations with students simultaneously. The technology’s ability to generate human-like responses in real-time allows these AI chatbots to engage with numerous students without compromising the quality of their interactions.

The teaching team will save time not having to answer similar questions over and over again, and students will receive answers immediately. One of her favorite uses of the technology is to bring more interactivity into the classroom. Teaching methods that get students to be creative, to role-play, or to think critically lead to a deeper kind of learning than rote memorization, she says. ChatGPT can play the role of a debate opponent and generate counterarguments to a student’s positions, for example. By exposing students to an endless supply of opposing viewpoints, chatbots could help them look for weak points in their own thinking.

Whether it’s admission-related inquiries or general questions, educational chatbots offer a seamless and time-saving alternative, empowering students with instant and accurate assistance at their fingertips. Udacity is another online course provider using OpenAI’s GPT-4 to create a virtual, on-demand AI tutor. As Udacity explains, one of the challenges of online learning is how to provide personalized guidance and support when people need it most – i.e., when they’re in the flow of learning and working through tough problems. Udacity’s virtual chatbot tutor meets this need by providing detailed explanations and guidance tailored to each individual learner. The virtual tutor can also be used to summarize concepts, provide deeper questions and alternative explanations on demand, and even translate learning materials into other languages.

5 RQ5 – What are the principles used to guide the design of the educational chatbots?

It is very important that they understand from the beginning that they are not chatting with a human. At the same time, they should also be told who is the teacher who has designed the chatbot and, most importantly, that the information they share with the chatbot will be seen by the teacher. Depending on the activity and the goals, I often design the bot to ask students for a code name instead of their real name (the chatbot refers to the person by that name at different points in the conversation).

A chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation with an end user. Not all chatbots are equipped with artificial intelligence (AI), but modern chatbots increasingly use conversational AI techniques such as natural language processing (NLP) to understand user questions and automate responses to them. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. The findings indicate other key potential areas for AIC improvement to better cater to users’ proficiency levels. The development of LLM-power chatbots could help avoid irrelevant responses often resulting from an over-reliance on pre-set answers, as indicated by Jeon (2021). The second dimension of the CHISM model, focusing on the Design Experience (DEX), underscores its critical role in fostering user engagement and satisfaction beyond the linguistic dimension. Elements such as the chatbot interface and multimedia content hold substantial importance in this regard.

Other chatbots acted as intelligent tutoring systems, such as Oscar (Latham et al., 2011), used for teaching computer science topics. Moreover, other web-based chatbots such as EnglishBot (Ruan et al., 2021) help students learn a foreign language. Winkler and Söllner (2018) reviewed 80 articles to analyze recent trends in educational chatbots. The authors found that chatbots are used for health and well-being advocacy, language learning, and self-advocacy. Chatbots are either flow-based or powered by AI, concerning approaches to their designs.

In the cases of CSUN and Georgia State, their chatbots began as an extension of their admissions offices. At CSUN, students were first introduced to CSUNny when they submitted their deposits. The chatbot then guided them through the rest of the enrollment process, reminding them to stay on top of financial aid applications and helping them stay connected until they visited campus for the first time. But lost in some of the clamor over generative AI tools like ChatGPT is the reality that AI has been a helpful ally to colleges and universities for years. AI tutors have been assisting students since at least 2016, and university-branded chatbots have been around just as long.

I think every K-12 teacher will look at tenured professors at the local university with envy because those professors have a lot of support. They have these grad students who essentially do exactly what that example the AI was doing. You’re still the teacher, you’re in charge, but it’ll save you the teacher 10, 15 hours of your week. Yes, I definitely want that.’ I’m serious that I don’t think it in any way undermines the teacher.

This could lead to data leakage and violate an organization’s security policies. AI chatbots are commonly used in social media messaging apps, standalone messaging platforms, proprietary websites and apps, and even on phone calls (where they are also known as integrated voice response, or IVR). The terms chatbot, AI chatbot and virtual agent are often used interchangeably, which can cause confusion. While the technologies these terms refer to are closely related, subtle distinctions yield important differences in their respective capabilities. If you would like more visual formatting and branding control, you can add a third party tool such as BotCopy.

Furthermore, the evaluations of the AICs by both Spanish and Czech cohorts displayed similar results. This analysis led us to conclude that language nativeness and the specific educational settings of the participants were not key factors influencing the results of our study. Regarding gender, 81% of the participants were females, while 19% were male students. In this research, the term chatbot (AIC) is used to refer to virtual tutors integrated into mobile applications specifically designed for language learning to provide students with a personalized and interactive experience.

This suggests the need for evolving teaching methods and curricula to more effectively incorporate AICs, emphasizing the enhancement of their capabilities for providing contextually rich and varied linguistic experiences. One practical approach could be the introduction of specific learning modules on different types of chatbots, such as app-integrated, web-based, and standalone tools, as well as Artificial Intelligence, into the curriculum. Such modules would equip students and future educators with a deeper understanding of these technologies and how they can be utilized in language education. The implications of these findings are significant, as they provide a roadmap for the development of more effective and engaging AICs for language learning in the future. This gap is more pronounced in understanding how the design and linguistic features of AICs impact user satisfaction and engagement. While studies like those of Chen et al. (2020) and Chocarro et al. (2023) have begun exploring these areas, there is a need for a more targeted framework to evaluate satisfaction with AICs in the context of language learning.

Chatbots have affordances that can take out-in-the-world learning to the next level. The most important of those affordances is that chatbots can respond differently to each learner, depending on what they say or ask, so the experience adapts to the learner. This can increase the learner’s sense of agency and their ownership of the learning process. It supports students by providing information on admissions, course details, financial aid, campus services, and academic resources. In our review process, we carefully adhered to the inclusion and exclusion criteria specified in Table 2. Criteria were determined to ensure the studies chosen are relevant to the research question (content, timeline) and maintain a certain level of quality (literature type) and consistency (language, subject area).

This is possible through data analysis and natural language processing, which allow chatbots to tailor their responses to specific users. Future studies should explore chatbot localization, where a chatbot is customized based on the culture and context it is used in. Moreover, researchers should explore devising frameworks for designing and developing educational chatbots to guide educators to build usable and effective chatbots. Finally, researchers should explore EUD tools that allow non-programmer educators to design and develop educational chatbots to facilitate the development of educational chatbots. Adopting EUD tools to build chatbots would accelerate the adoption of the technology in various fields.

Remember to take the lead when using chatbots for team projects, making your own choices while incorporating the helpful and discarding what is not. With active listening skills, Juji chatbots can help educational organizations engage with their audience (e.g., existing or prospect students) 24×7, answering questions and providing just-in-time assistance. Powered by super AI, a unique combination of generative AI and cognitive AI, Juji’s education solution enables the best-in-class chatbots to aid both students and instructors, aiming at delivering superior user experience and learning outcomes. These chatbots are also faster to build and easier to be integrated with other education applications.

The students appreciated that the robot was attentive, curious, and eager to learn. In general, most desktop-based chatbots were built in or before 2013, probably because desktop-based systems are cumbersome to modern users as they must be downloaded and installed, need frequent updates, and are dependent on operating systems. Unsurprisingly, most chatbots were web-based, probably because the web-based applications are operating system independent, do not require downloading, installing, or updating. According to an App Annie report, users spent 120 billion dollars on application stores Footnote 8. A few other subjects were targeted by the educational chatbots, such as engineering (Mendez et al., 2020), religious education (Alobaidi et al., 2013), psychology (Hayashi, 2013), and mathematics (Rodrigo et al., 2012).

But what he found was that Googling—what to ask for and what to make of the results—was itself a skill worth teaching. Many are too overworked, under-resourced, and beholden to https://chat.openai.com/ strict performance metrics to take advantage of any opportunities that chatbots may present. Meet the teachers who think generative AI could actually make learning better.

The cautious rollout is the company’s first public effort to address the recent chatbot craze driven by OpenAI and Microsoft, and it is meant to demonstrate that Google is capable of providing similar technology. But Google is taking a much more circumspect approach than its competitors, which have faced criticism that they are proliferating an unpredictable and sometimes untrustworthy technology. His students are also learning from the imperfections of the technology, and sharpening their skills on how to spot where AI-generated content falls short. Google highlighted Gemini Education as a tool for teachers using Workspace to create agendas, summarize meetings, and elevate presentations.

Bing, the long-mocked search engine from Microsoft, recently got a big upgrade. The newest version, which is available only to a small group of testers, has been outfitted with advanced artificial intelligence technology from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft’s new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with. She said that assigning academic tuition to AI lets kids have a more personalized experience and learn at their own level, avoiding lagging behind their classmates. In May, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google — three companies leading the charge in the AI arms race — debuted impressive demonstrations of their chatbots, and education was a talking point at each of their events. The University of Western Cape (UWC) has developed a student mental health and well-being policy that seeks to address the issue in an integrated manner.

Chatbots can assist students with course scheduling and registration, providing information on course availability, prerequisites, and class schedules. They can also help students select courses based on their interests and academic goals. While using questionnaires as an evaluation method, the studies identified high subjective satisfaction, usefulness, and perceived usability. The questionnaires used mostly Likert scale closed-ended questions, but a few questionnaires also used open-ended questions. 3 is more than 36 (the number of selected articles) as the authors of a single article could work in institutions located in different countries. The vast majority of selected articles were written or co-written by researchers from American universities.

« It can literally raise the floor of what’s possible for students, and then just blow the ceiling off and help students wherever they’re at, » she told BI. Alexander told BI that AI helps with brainstorming ideas and developing case studies — things he would’ve had to come up with on his own before — »without taking up a lot of class time. » But even then to the earlier part of our conversation, even when it’s that awesome, I don’t know if every student in the world is just going to run to it. But yeah, it is powerful to see it in action with a student where it can see what they’re drawing and what they’re saying, and it’s interacting verbally in a very natural way. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. ArXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Chatbots can yield valuable data for mental health research, identifying trends, symptoms, user behaviour and the possibility of more effective interventions. By measuring what works and what is effective, we at UWC are able to provide the right solution at the right time on a personalised basis, without losing scalability. [At Khan Academy] we’ve always been trying to use technology to approximate what a great tutor would do in terms of personalized learning and then also leverage technology to scale that to as many people as possible. In fact, we said, ‘Hey, this could be really valuable in a teaching setting.’ In fact, it’s most valuable in a teaching setting because a teacher’s in a class of 30, these kids are at all different levels. Well, if you had support from a teaching assistant who’s also their tutor, that’s kind of what Khan Academy has always aspired to be. If you’re a lifelong learner, chances are you’ve taken an online course or two over the years.

But his book, and that demo, are also attracting some pushback from teaching experts who think AI may have lots of uses in education, but that tutoring should be reserved for humans who can motivate and understand the students they work with. I sat in on a ChatGPT workshop this month for teachers at Walla Walla High School, about 270 miles southeast of Seattle. As a reporter who covers education technology, I have closely followed how generative artificial intelligence has upended education. Find critical answers and insights from your business data using AI-powered enterprise search technology. Selecting the right chatbot platform can have a significant payoff for both businesses and users. Users benefit from immediate, always-on support while businesses can better meet expectations without costly staff overhauls.

Smutny and Schreiberova (2020) examined chatbots as a learning aid for Facebook Messenger. Thomas (2020) discussed the benefits of educational chatbots for learners and educators, showing that the chatbots are successful educational tools, and their benefits outweigh the shortcomings and offer a more effective educational experience. Okonkwo and Ade-Ibijola (2021) analyzed the main benefits and challenges of implementing chatbots in an educational setting. This paper will help to better understand how educational chatbots can be effectively utilized to enhance education and address the specific needs and challenges of students and educators.

In fact, some educators think future textbooks could be bundled with chatbots trained on their contents. Students would have a conversation with the bot about the book’s contents as well as (or instead of) reading it. The chatbot could generate personalized quizzes to coach students on topics they understand less well. All students can benefit from personalized teaching materials, says Culatta, because everybody has different learning preferences. Teachers might prepare a few different versions of their teaching materials to cover a range of students’ needs.

• Some chatbots have options to opt out of sharing data which are described in the terms of service.
• She recently has developed the “d.bot,” which takes a software feature that many of us know through our experiences as customers — the chatbot — and deploys it instead as a tool for teaching and learning.
• The truth is that they will take over the repetitive tasks and make a teacher’s work more meaningful.
• As a rule of thumb, it takes one person about a month to make a chatbot with 30 different outputs (ie, types of content you want the user to engage with).
• Crompton also notes that if English is not a student’s first language, chatbots can be a big help in drafting text or paraphrasing existing documents, doing a lot to level the playing field.
• Firstly, it aims to investigate the current knowledge and opinions of language teacher candidates regarding App-Integrated Chatbots (AICs).

The bot answers students’ questions on an online forum and provides technical information about courses and lectures. Today, many teachers are solely focused on memorizing lessons and grading tests. By taking over these tasks, chatbots will allow teachers to concentrate on establishing a stronger relationship with students. Chat GPT They will have the opportunity to provide them with personal guidance and enhance the curriculum with their own research interests. Consequently, this will be especially helpful for students with learning disabilities. They engage in a dialogue with each student and determine the areas where they are falling behind.

And this is one of the many reasons why we view involving teachers in this journey as so important. With a lack of proper input data, there is the ongoing risk of “hallucinations,” delivering inaccurate or irrelevant answers that require the customer to escalate the conversation to another channel. To help illustrate the distinctions, imagine that a user is curious about tomorrow’s weather. With a traditional chatbot, the user can use the specific phrase “tell me the weather forecast.” The chatbot says it will rain.

An AI-powered chatbot can handle a high volume of inquiries simultaneously and cater to a larger pool of students without compromising the quality of engagement. An integrated chatbot and CRM, enables automated follow-ups for incoming inquiries. The CRM can trigger personalized messages, reminders, and notifications to prospective students at various stages of the admissions process.

As a result, students may come to believe that there is only one way to write such a narrative. ChatGPT allows teachers to offer students many examples of a narrative about family where the basic content remains the same but style, syntax, or grammar differ. With many examples to compare and analyze, students can begin to see the relationship between form and content. They can develop criteria for what makes a strong piece of writing, or how one verb might affect readers differently than another. For teachers, designing instruction has just become much easier — ChatGPT is essentially a tool for creating contrasting cases, and most teachers will be delighted that ChatGPT is doing a lot of the legwork for them.

This means that Google Bard is more likely to be up-to-date on current events, while ChatGPT is more likely to be accurate in its responses to factual questions (AlZubi et al., 2022; Rahaman et al., 2023; Rudolph et al., 2023). As Conversational AI and Generative AI continue to advance, chatbots in education will become even more intuitive and interactive. They will play an increasingly vital role in personalized learning, adapting to individual student preferences and learning styles. Moreover, chatbots will foster seamless communication between educators, students, and parents, promoting better engagement and learning outcomes. AI chatbots equipped with sentiment analysis capabilities can play a pivotal role in assisting teachers. By comprehending student sentiments, these chatbots help educators modify and enhance their teaching practices, creating better learning experiences.

However, the research that emerged from all European universities combined was the highest in the number of articles (19 articles). Asian universities have contributed 10 articles, while American universities contributed 9 articles. Finally, universities from Africa and Australia contributed 4 articles (2 articles each). Pérez et al. (2020) identified various technologies used to implement chatbots such as Dialogflow Footnote 4, FreeLing (Padró and Stanilovsky, 2012), and ChatFuel Footnote 5. The study investigated the effect of the technologies used on performance and quality of chatbots.