Enhancing higher education with artificial intelligence: implementing and assessing a chatbot in a business information systems course

Isaias, Pedro; Hoque, Tania Tanzin; Miranda, Paula

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.2/20728

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Authors

Isaias, Pedro

Hoque, Tania Tanzin

Miranda, Paula

Abstract(s)

The higher education sector is continuously searching for innovative technologies that can assist both lecturers and students to be prolific. The deployment of artificial intelligence in educational settings can assume a panoply of forms. Chatbots are a valuable example of the deployment of artificial intelligence in higher education, as they become increasingly popular in other areas of society. As with any innovative technology, the use of chatbots, in higher education, requires extensive research and careful consideration of their pedagogical value. The lessons learned from lecturers who experiment with chatbots can constitute important evidence to support their use. This paper presents a chatbot specifically designed for a higher education course, named RESOURCEbot, its mechanics and workflows. This chatbot was used in a university course to assist the students with recommendations of relevant research papers. It is also presented the chatbot’s evaluation. The evaluation of the RESOURCEbot derived from a questionnaire that was distributed among the students to assess their opinions about the experience of using a chatbot, its performance and their intention to use chatbots in educational settings. The results highlighted some of RESOURCEbot’s limitations, such as some difficulty in understanding the students’ prompts, but overall, they reflected the students’ positive opinions concerning its ease of use, and the value and pertinence of its recommendations.