The use of chatbots in university EFL settings: Research trends and pedagogical implications

The instruments were rated based on the Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) and administered using Google Forms for both groups. Where else, learning performance was assessed based on the assessment of the project, which includes report, product, presentation, and peer-to-peer assessment. Therefore, it was hypothesized that using ECs could improve learning outcomes, and a quasi-experimental design comparing EC and traditional (CT) groups were facilitated, as suggested by Wang et al. (2021), to answer the following research questions. Educational chatbots can help you know more about the needs of your students through personal interactions and offer them the courses accordingly.

They then collect each prospect’s information and use that to increase conversions through personalised engagement and quality interaction. They then provide prospects with all required information on the institution and help ease the processes by answering all queries and easing up legacy processes. Chatbots also follow up with prospects and assist in the final enrolment and onboarding process. Chatbots collect student data during enrolment processes and keep updating their profiles as the data increases. Through chatbot technology it is easier to collect and store student information to use it as and when required. Institutes no longer have to constantly summon students for their details every single time something needs to be updated.

How can chatbots improve student experience?

None of the studies discussed the platforms on which the chatbots run, while only one study (Wollny et al., 2021) analyzed the educational roles the chatbots are playing. The study used “teaching,” “assisting,” and “mentoring” as categories for educational roles. This study, however, uses different classifications (e.g., “teaching agent”, “peer agent”, “motivational agent”) supported by the literature in Chhibber and Law (2019), Baylor (2011), and Kerlyl et al. (2006). Other studies such as (Okonkwo and Ade-Ibijola, 2021; Pérez et al., 2020) partially covered this dimension by mentioning that chatbots can be teaching or service-oriented. Winkler and Söllner (2018) reviewed 80 articles to analyze recent trends in educational chatbots. The authors found that chatbots are used for health and well-being advocacy, language learning, and self-advocacy.

Moreover, other web-based chatbots such as EnglishBot (Ruan et al., 2021) help students learn a foreign language. Moreover, according to Cunningham-Nelson et al. (2019), one of the key benefits of EC is that it can support a large number of users simultaneously, which is undeniably an added advantage as it reduces instructors’ workload. Colace et al. (2018) describe ECs as instrumental when dealing with multiple students, especially testing behavior, keeping track of progress, and assigning tasks. Furthermore, ECs were also found to increase autonomous learning skills and tend to reduce the need for face-to-face interaction between instructors and students (Kumar & Silva, 2020; Yin et al., 2021). Conversely, this is an added advantage for online learning during the onset of the pandemic. Likewise, ECs can also be used purely for administrative purposes, such as delivering notices, reminders, notifications, and data management support (Chocarro et al., 2021).

Purpose of the study

Furthermore, they offer situated context, as well as immediate automated feedback that can reduce teachers´ load. The introduction of Artificial Intelligence technology enables the integration of Chatbot systems into various aspects of education. Chatbot technology has the potential to provide quick and personalised services to everyone in the sector, including institutional employees and students. This paper presents a systematic review of previous studies on the use of Chatbots in education. A systematic review approach was used to analyse 53 articles from recognised digital databases. The implications of the findings were discussed, and suggestions were made.

In fact, 85% of them admitted to having felt more comfortable and relaxed conversing with the bots over a student partner or teacher as in classical teaching. Botsify conversational forms are a great way to collect feedback from students. These forms can be used to take a survey from students such as, how their course could be improved, how did they like the previous lecture or overall quality of their learning experience. Chatbots have been proven to increase engagement among learners and improve retention rates.

How long does it take to build a chatbot? What is the process like?

We found that AI chatbots that AI chatbots have recently been used in the classroom. Thus, the chatbot is a platform for both teachers’ and learners’ new exposure to teaching and learning different language skills in different contexts (Adam et al., 2021). This is especially true for developing EFL speaking skills (Divekar et al., 2021). This conversational agent works by providing visual contexts, embodying dialogue agents, speech recognition, sustained engagement, and understanding natural language for improving conversational skills (Adam et al., 2021; Allouch et al., 2021; Fitria, 2021). Three categories of research gaps were identified from empirical findings (i) learning outcomes, (ii) design issues, and (iii) assessment and testing issues. EC studies have primarily focused on language learning, programming, and health courses, implying that EC application and the investigation of learning outcomes have not been investigated in various educational domains and levels of education.

The approach authors use often relies on a general knowledge base not tied to a specific field. Recently, chatbots have been utilized in various fields (Ramesh et al., 2017). Most importantly, chatbots played a critical role in the education field, in which most researchers (12 articles; 33.33%) developed chatbots used to teach computer science topics (Fig. 4). While the identified limitations are relevant, this study identifies limitations from other perspectives such as the design of the chatbots and the student experience with the educational chatbots. To sum up, Table 2 shows some gaps that this study aims at bridging to reflect on educational chatbots in the literature. Chatbots have been utilized in education as conversational pedagogical agents since the early 1970s (Laurillard, 2013).

Deliver conversational support with Freshchat’s educational chatbots

You can acquire the information gathered and work on future finances accordingly. With a shift towards online education and EdTech platforms, course queries and fee structure is what many people look for. However, no one has enough time to convey all the related information, and here comes the role of a chatbot.

At the same time, the introduction of ECs did not create cognitive barriers that would have affected the cognition, motivational and creative processes involved in project-based learning. Furthermore, as there is a triangulated relationship between these outcomes, the author speculates that these outcomes were justified, especially with the small sample size used, as Rosenstein (2019) explained. It was observed that communicating merely was not the main priority anymore as cooperation towards problem-solving is of utmost importance. Example feedback is such as “I learn to push myself more and commit to the project’s success.” Nevertheless, in both groups, all the trends are almost similar.

Teaching assistance

It can also reduce the amount of time it takes to process applications and increase the accuracy of information provided to applicants. The first step is to identify which features will make your bot most effective. This includes things like what type of information it should provide, who it should talk to, and whether it should be able to respond to natural language queries. Personalize marketing, capture leads, automate student support, streamline administrative processes and digitalize learning experiences.

AI tutors have been assisting students since at least 2016, and university-branded chatbots have been around just as long. University chatbots took on even greater importance during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when reinforcing any kind of connection between students and their campus was a major challenge. Most of the conversations in my department during December were centered around the news that a new AI tool, ChatGPT, was able to generate a reasonable facsimile of student writing in a few seconds.

A chatbot is a Medium of Learning

Botsify chatbot for Education is dedicated to students, teachers, administrations and the entire education industry across the globe. It can not only help students learn online but teachers can get assistance in the evaluation, grading and student feedback collection. This gives the benefit of enhancing their learning process and increase engagement in individual subjects.

• For implementing AI chatbots for teaching language skills in language classes, policymakers and teachers must come across models and frameworks for getting benefits.
• Apart from that, the education bot also responds to all payment-related queries in real time thus eliminating longer waiting times.
• Shows the flowchart of the selecting processes, in which the final stage of the selection resulted in 36 papers.
• The education sector isn’t necessarily the first that springs to mind when you think of businesses that readily engage with technology.
• The teaching and learning in both classes are identical, wherein the students are required to design and develop a multimedia-based instructional tool that is deemed their course project.
• Studies that used questionnaires as a form of evaluation assessed subjective satisfaction, perceived usefulness, and perceived usability, apart from one study that assessed perceived learning (Table 11).

Ensuing, the researcher also considered creative self-efficacy, defined as the students’ belief in producing creative outcomes (Brockhus et al., 2014). Prior research has not mentioned creativity as a learning outcome in EC studies. However, according to Pan et al. (2020), there is a positive relationship between creativity and the need for cognition as it also reflects individual innovation behavior. Likewise, it was deemed necessary due to the nature of the project, which involves design. Lastly, teamwork perception was defined as students’ perception of how well they performed as a team to achieve their learning goals. According to Hadjielias et al. (2021), the cognitive state of teams involved in digital innovations is usually affected by the task involved within the innovation stages.

The evaluation of chatbot as a tool for health literacy education among undergraduate students

– Almost all the respondents are familiar with ChatGPT (but typically not with other chatbots); more than a third use ChatGPT regularly. Students’ knowledge and usage of other AI-language tools, particularly language translation tools, is widespread. Students in Sweden are positive towards AI tools such as ChatGPT in education, but 62 percent believe that using chatbots during exams is cheating.

• Nonetheless, there were both negative and positive effects according to the learners’ level.
• University chatbots took on even greater importance during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when reinforcing any kind of connection between students and their campus was a major challenge.
• Therefore, the present study investigates how integrating ECs to facilitate team-based projects for a design course could influence learning outcomes.
• The authors in (Ruan et al., 2021) used a similar approach where students freely speak a foreign language.
• Instructors can gather anonymous feedback either on a granular level (eg, regarding a particular class session), or more generally (eg, about the arc of learning over an entire course).
• Grading students’ work is one of the most time-consuming parts of a teacher’s role, and the development of intelligent essay scoring bots to alleviate some of this workload could be revolutionary.

They reduce the workload for administration by segregating all existing data and answering all institute-related and other reoccurring queries. Chatbots also help digitalise the enrolment process and make communication between students and universities way less complicated. Education chatbots are conversational bots used by EdTech https://www.metadialog.com/blog/chatbots-in-education-sector/ companies, universities, schools or any educational institute. They are virtual assistants that help teach students, evaluate papers, get student and alumni data, update curriculums and coordinate admission processes. Fryer and Carpenter did an experiment where 211 students were asked to chat with ALICE and Jabberwocky chatbots.

After defining the criteria, our search query was performed in the selected databases to begin the inclusion and exclusion process. Initially, the total of studies resulting from the databases was 1208 studies. The metadata of the studies containing; title, abstract, type of article (conference, journal, short paper), language, and keywords were extracted in a file format (e.g., bib file format). Subsequently, it was imported into the Rayyan tool Footnote 6, which allowed for reviewing, including, excluding, and filtering the articles collaboratively by the authors.

Both the learning buddy chatbot and the goal setting Chatbot employing Google Dialogflow were visual development tools that did not require prior computer programming knowledge (cf. Mendoza et al., 2022). Higher education chatbot provides personalized and interactive AI-powered education, thus optimizing the learning experience and achieving the best outcomes. With the help of active listening capabilities, these bots allow educational institutes engage with their students and parents in real-time, 24/7, replying to their queries and offering instant assistance. A notable example of a study using questionnaires is ‘Rexy,’ a configurable educational chatbot discussed in (Benedetto & Cremonesi, 2019). The questionnaires elicited feedback from participants and mainly evaluated the effectiveness and usefulness of learning with Rexy. However, a few participants pointed out that it was sufficient for them to learn with a human partner.

52.77% of the articles used flow-based chatbots where the user had to follow a specific learning path predetermined by the chatbot. Notable examples are explained in (Rodrigo et al., 2012; Griol et al., 2014), where the authors presented a chatbot that asks students questions and provides them with options to choose metadialog.com from. Other authors, such as (Daud et al., 2020), used a slightly different approach where the chatbot guides the learners to select the topic they would like to learn. Subsequently, the assessment of specific topics is presented where the user is expected to fill out values, and the chatbot responds with feedback.

• They also support personalized learning, multimodal content (Schmulian & Coetzee, 2019), and instant interaction without time limits (Chocarro et al., 2021).
• Even though MIM applications were not intended for pedagogical use, but due to affordance and their undemanding role in facilitating communication, they have established themselves as a learning platform (Kumar et al., 2020; Pereira et al., 2019).
• The third question discusses the roles chatbots play when interacting with students.
• Admission process- Chatbots help generate leads through the use of channels beyond the website like WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.
• Finally, studies published in languages other than English or not dealing with English language teaching and learning at the university level were excluded.
• Even if you are providing the best quality education, they need regular interaction and activities to keep them engaged and tied with the institute.