Chatbot as a teaching assistant

Abstract

In recent years, chatbots have gained traction and been widely adopted in the retail sector to help businesses grow, chatbots have been developed and used in many websites and social media pages of retail businesses to answer questions from their customers. However, the application of chatbots in the education sector is still lacking compared to the widespread adoption in the retail sector. This project aims to design and evaluate the suitability of having a chatbot as a teaching assistant for a Digital Logic course taught in Nanyang Technological University (NTU). A prototype chatbot was implemented for the course using a chatbot application called Dialogflow developed by Google. The prototype was tested among the students taking the course in semester 1 of AY2021/2022 in NTU. The chat history from the chatbot for the first 7 weeks of the semester was collected and analysed thoroughly. Overall, while the data gathered from this project contained interesting findings and results, these results were insufficient to conclusively evaluate the suitability and performance of having a chatbot as a teaching assistants. However, the results from this implementation showed that having a chatbot to supplement learning is a workable idea with great potential if developed further.