'Help! How do I study effectively?': How to implement a self-learning, artificially intelligent chatbot as a flexible study coach in an online learning environment

Students in higher education spend the majority of their time on self-study. After instruction, the quality of students’ self-study activities largely determines their learning outcomes and academic performance. There is ample evidence that students use suboptimal self-study strategies and that it is difficult for them to assess their own strategies’ quality. Examples of training programs and tutorials in effective self-study do exist, but they are not task-specific, not personalized, limited in time and require a large teaching load.

Educational chatbots
We believe the solution for this problem lies in educational chatbots. This project will develop an educational chatbot that provides instant, personalized and context-specific study advice to students in all educational programs at the OU. A pilot chatbot is currently under development at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, but this chatbot features fixed, pre-structured advice methods in one limited setting. This project investigates how a much more general, adaptive chatbot can be obtained for experimental investigation with automated advice strategies on effective learning.