While the first year of the Covid pandemic was typified by remote learning as universities across the world attempted to stymie the spread of the virus by shifting teaching online, there was a significant shift back towards in-person classes for the 2021/2022 academic year.
Ordinarily, fully online courses would be developed specifically for the medium, with support offered by experts in online learning, but of course, the rapid nature of the pandemic meant this wasn’t feasible and many online courses had a somewhat haphazard feel to them as a result.
Teaching efficiently
While it’s highly unlikely that universities will be returning to a fully-online approach, research has shown that being better able to teach effectively across a variety of platforms is nonetheless a hugely valuable skill to acquire.
Evidence from the first wave of the pandemic shows that staff were often spending up to 14 hours per day adapting their offering and supporting faculty. Such a workload has resulted in understandable difficulties recruiting and retaining suitably qualified candidates.
This is where chatbots could play an invaluable role in taking care of much of the low-level and repetitive tasks that teaching facilities have to field. Chatbots have the advantage of being available around the clock while also able to field numerous requests simultaneously. As in other use cases, by turning to chatbots for the easier inquiries, teams are also then freed up to handle more complex inquiries that arise.
Helping faculty
An article in Nature last year highlighted the extremely high levels of burnout among academics. The article explains how burnout has ballooned during the pandemic as a result of the “continuous, long-term physical, cognitive or emotional effort” that faculty are exposed to. They cite a survey of 1,122 faculty members across the United States, which found that nearly 70% felt stressed during 2020. This is roughly double the number who reported the same in 2019.
This was prompting over half of respondents to consider changing career or retiring early. It’s a brain drain the sector can ill afford and chatbots might be able to play a small role in alleviating this pressure by guiding faculty towards effective resources to help them during such a stressful period. The chatbot could easily be tailored to suit the individual needs of each individual, and especially their experience in developing hybrid learning experiences.
A paper published last year from the University of Johannesburg highlights the growing use of chatbots in higher education, whether to support teaching, perform administrative tasks, or help students with their research.
“Chatbot technology is a good innovation with the capabilities of improving not only teaching and learning but all other aspects of education,” the authors write.
Increasing capacity
This kind of deployment of chatbot technology would be in line with the recommendations outlined by the Institute for Ethical AI in Education, which recommended in 2020 that AI-based technologies should increase the capacity of higher education institutions.
Chatbots can certainly help to achieve this, but developers should be mindful to ensure that they are developed so that they’re sensitive to key ethical values, such as security, transparency, and accountability.
It’s also important to clearly document how the data submitted to the chatbot will be managed, especially if it is being used to discuss potentially sensitive topics. There have also been fears among some early adopters that they provide information too easily, and therefore inhibit the critical thinking skills of users. Some have attempted to overcome this by designing the chatbot specifically to avoid spoon-feeding information to users and instead encourage more self-reflection and independent learning.
Personalized learning
If used correctly, however, chatbots can play a crucial role in the desire of higher education institutions to provide personalized learning that is supported by the latest tools and technologies but which is so hard to achieve given the tremendous pressure and strain academics are under.
“The only way of achieving that learning intimacy at massive scale is through powerful digital engagement that responds to the needs of a new generation of students,” William Confalonieri, chief digital officer at Australia’s Deakin University explained last year. “An artificial-intelligence-enabled personalized digital assistant can proactively engage with students via a conversational user interface, guiding them through study and life at university.”
Deakin have pioneered the use of chatbots with their Genie tool, which provides information to students around things such as their deadlines. It is also capable of tracking each student’s academic progress and even learning their study preferences.
The Open University’s annual Innovating Pedagogy report identified chatbots as a high-impact education trend, with the report suggesting that bots are currently capable of mimicking the insights of professionals with several years’ experience.
With chatbots and digital assistants becoming increasingly useful across a range of domains, it seems inevitable that higher education will follow suit and begin to let our digital friends shoulder some of the burdens our complex world places upon us.
