Building a chatbot for student support

• Autor(a) principal: Rocio, Vitor
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Wesley, Anila
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34627/rcc.v15i0.261

Online distance education has received a lot of attention lately, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, most students are not familiar with its pedagogical approaches, need for autonomous studying, modes of assessment, and also administrative services, that mostly function online. In this context, students generally need an initial support that some institutions provide in the form of a bootcamp course/module. As most of the doubts of the new students are the same, in this paper we propose to introduce an automated chatbot that directly answers those common questions that students have when they start to attend an online university. The bot was provided to students in the bootcamp module, complementing the role of the (human) module monitor. After assessing student feedback, we obtain encouraging results, that point to the convenience of using an automated chatbot for directly answering frequently asked questions and to provide initial support.