Chatbot as a teaching assistant

Abstract

Chatbots serve as virtual assistants, allowing businesses to sell products and services via the internet. However, the application of chatbots in the education sector is still lacking compared to their ubiquity in the business sector. This project aims to design and implement an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based chatbot to handle the questions and answers of students undertaking the Digital Logic course taught at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). A prototype chatbot was implemented for the course using Dialogflow, a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) module, which converted students’ questions during a conversation to structured data that the chatbot could understand. Students could obtain answers for general or course related questions from the chatbot. The data collected from students used in the first semester of the AY2021/2022 test run indicated that the chatbot could not take over the tutor’s position in mentoring a student. However, the chatbot fulfilled its main objective in supporting students’ learning processes and providing real-time 24/7 assistance to students. Thus, having a chatbot to supplement learning is a feasible idea with immense potential and may eventually become a teaching assistant in the future.