TY - GEN
T1 - Learning by Building Chatbot
T2 - 19th International Conference on Augmented Intelligence and Intelligent Tutoring Systems, ITS 2023
AU - Nikou, Stavros A.
AU - Chang, Maiga
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Block
KW - Chatbot
KW - RiveScript
KW - System Usability
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85163353956&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-32883-1_31
DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-32883-1_31
M3 - Published Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85163353956
SN - 9783031328824
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 342
EP - 351
BT - Augmented Intelligence and Intelligent Tutoring Systems - 19th International Conference, ITS 2023, Proceedings
A2 - Frasson, Claude
A2 - Mylonas, Phivos
A2 - Troussas, Christos
Y2 - 2 June 2023 through 5 June 2023
ER -
