Briefing paper: chatbots in education

11 December, 2018

By Marc Fuertes-Alpiste and Núria Molas-Castells

Chatbots or conversational assistants are programs that integrate artificial intelligence and are able to simulate or maintain a certain level of conversation with people through the use of natural language. Currently, they are already widespread in activities such as e-commerce or customer service and, for some time now, their potential in education has been explored. This briefing paper is a contribution to better understand how chatbots can be integrated to improve the educational processes.

The briefing paper includes its definition and the elements that integrate them, and there is a proposal of classification for the chatbots in the educational environment. Some bots can perform management and administration tasks. But there are also some of them with specific educational intentions that can act as tutors to accompany the learning process or for the exercise and practice of skills and competencies. Finally, the report points to the idea that the chatbots can work not so much to replace the teaching figure as to assume the repetitive and low cognitive level functions, with an equal distribution of tasks. In any case, the incorporation of chatbots in educational institutions must be preceded by an institutional and organizational reflection that can clearly address what are the contributions they can make in the teaching and learning processes.

The document Briefing paper: the chatbots in education has been made by the members of the Research and Trends Analysis team of the UOC eLearn Center, Marc Fuertes-Alpiste and Núria Molas-Castells and the Director team itself, Guillem Garcia Brustenga. It is available in the O2 Institutional Repository of the UOC at the following address: http://hdl.handle.net/10609/80185

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About the authors
Núria Molas is a member of the eLearn Center's research staff, and a researcher and lecturer at the University of Barcelona.
Marc Fuertes is a member of the eLearn Center's research staff, and a researcher and lecturer at the University of Barcelona.
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