Learning by Building Chatbot: A System Usability Study and Teachers’ Views About the Educational Uses of Chatbots

Stavros A. Nikou, Maiga Chang

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingPublished Conference contributionpeer-review

    4 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    This article describes an experiment to investigate the usability of the “Learning by Building Chatbot” environment and the views of in-service teachers about the potential educational uses of chatbots. Chatbots are text or voice-based conversational interfaces that use natural language to simulate human conversations serving as virtual assistants to users. They have been used in a variety of areas such as e-commerce and healthcare while their use in education is relatively new. Chatbots have the potential to offer new dynamic forms of interactions, but there is often a burden to users to deploy and maintain their own chatbots. Our research group has proposed a web-based environment, “Learning by Building Chatbot”, that alleviates this burden by offering educators and students without any programming knowledge the opportunity to deploy and maintain their own chatbots for learning and training. The environment is a block-based, visual editing environment of creating RiveScript-powered chatbots for learning and training, without needing to know any RiveScript. Twelve in-service teachers registered in a postgraduate program in technology-enhanced learning used this environment to create their own chatbots. Afterwards, they completed the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire. Results have shown that the visualized editing environment for building chatbot is marginally acceptable and fair to use with the SUS score 57.50. Participants found the system ease to use and felt quite confident to use it. Its functions are well integrated while there are a few inconsistencies in the current version. Moreover, participants self-reported their views about the educational uses of chatbots. They agreed that chatbots, if used appropriately, can be a valuable educational tool because they can automate administrative and teaching tasks and can be supportive and engaging for students. However, since chatbot development is challenging, teacher should be well supported to integrate chatbots in the educational practice if they intend to do so.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationAugmented Intelligence and Intelligent Tutoring Systems - 19th International Conference, ITS 2023, Proceedings
    EditorsClaude Frasson, Phivos Mylonas, Christos Troussas
    Pages342-351
    Number of pages10
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2023
    Event19th International Conference on Augmented Intelligence and Intelligent Tutoring Systems, ITS 2023 - Corfu, Greece
    Duration: 2 Jun. 20235 Jun. 2023

    Publication series

    NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
    Volume13891 LNCS
    ISSN (Print)0302-9743
    ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

    Conference

    Conference19th International Conference on Augmented Intelligence and Intelligent Tutoring Systems, ITS 2023
    Country/TerritoryGreece
    CityCorfu
    Period2/06/235/06/23

    Keywords

    • Block
    • Chatbot
    • RiveScript
    • System Usability

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