Supporting Student-Teacher Interaction Through a Chatbot

Nowadays, an important part of academic education comes from online information, such as class topics, homework, and practices. In this sector, chatbots can be a valuable tool in the teaching/learning process by providing information about courses, procedures, and school services. Thus, the deployment of chatbots in schools and universities starts having a high priority for the academic staff. Nevertheless, most chatbots lack mechanisms to adequately integrate into the educational activities, since they should be useful for teachers, students, and educative assistant personnel (e.g., social workers, psychologists, pedagogues, and prefects). In this article, we propose a chatbot whose primary objective is to serve as an extra-school tool and as an intermediary between teachers and students. In this way, students could express themselves more freely, since the chatbot acts as a bridge with their teachers and other involved personnel. Our prototype was developed as a Web application that provides a text-based user interface and defines several interaction profiles to encompass the specific functions of the different actors in the teaching/learning process. We evaluated the proposed chatbot with the participation of third-year middle school students and teachers. In particular, we measured the workload perceived by our participants after performing a series of tasks. According to our results, our chatbot mostly obtained positive impressions from the test participants.