Build a Chatbot Workshop [A-073] Home : ALT Annual Conference 2019

Public Group active 1 year ago

Thu, Sep 5 2019, 2:00pm – 3:00pm

Authors: Myles Blaney, Marcello Crolla, and Stewart Cromar

Room: Room M2

Theme: Wildcard

Type: Workshop, panels or demo (60mins)

Description

Session Description

In recent years we have witnessed the Artificial Intelligence spring which has led to improvements in numerous technologies including chatbots.

The development of chatbots platforms by established vendors has led to the widespread adoption in the commercial sector (e.g. Skyscanner Facebook Messenger bot which can book your flights). The majority of chatbots deal with transactional interactions (e.g. going through a set process for a defined outcome) however the University of Edinburgh is undertaking research to explore whether chatbots could be leveraged within teaching and learning.

A ‘Teaching Bot’ could provide students with topic stimulation, provoke wider group conversations, provide the student with a tailored learning experience (reminders of daily tasks and revision suggestions) or help staff concentrate on high quality teaching or complex queries by tackling common course queries.

From our investigation into the education sector we have only identified research or experimental uses cases for chatbots in teaching and learning. It is an area that pedagogically is being explored, however there are limited examples of deployment. The University of Edinburgh has experimented in this field with ‘Teacherbot’ which was piloted in 2015 during the Digital Education MOOC.

The interactive workshop will provide an overview of chatbots in education and will involve attendees working in groups to identify a use case and build a paper based chatbot.

At the end of the session attendees will have gained an overview on chatbots in education and can reuse the paper prototyping exercise at their own institution to help identify and design chatbots.

Session content

The workshop will require attendees to work within groups and follow the below agenda
>Chatbot Presentation
>Attendess form groups (max 8 per group)
>Identify chatbot use case (purpose, audience, platform, name)
>Create questions list (question the chatbot would answer)
>Groups review and vote on each others questions
>Groups design a chatbot conversation using the question with the most votes
>Groups will present thier chatbot and can reflect on each others use cases

References

Bayne, S, (2015) ‘Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching, Teaching in Higher Education’ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13562517.2015.1020783

Hopkins, P & Maccabbee, R (2018) ‘Chatbots and Digital Assistants Report’ http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/7125/1/chatbots_and_digital_assistants_report.pdf

Marr, B (2018) ‘How Is AI Used In Education — Real World Examples Of Today And A Peek Into The Future’
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/07/25/how-is-ai-used-in-education-real-world-examples-of-today-and-a-peek-into-the-future/#238a966f586e

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