Interacting with educational chatbots: A systematic review

Chatbots hold the promise of revolutionizing education by engaging learners, personalizing learning activities, supporting educators, and developing deep insight into learners’ behavior. However, there is a lack of studies that analyze the recent evidence-based chatbot-learner interaction design techniques applied in education. This study presents a systematic review of 36 papers to understand, compare, and reflect on recent attempts to utilize chatbots in education using seven dimensions: educational field, platform, design principles, the role of chatbots, interaction styles, evidence, and limitations. The results show that the chatbots were mainly designed on a web platform to teach computer science, language, general education, and a few other fields such as engineering and mathematics. Further, more than half of the chatbots were used as teaching agents, while more than a third were peer agents. Most of the chatbots used a predetermined conversational path, and more than a quarter utilized a personalized learning approach that catered to students’ learning needs, while other chatbots used experiential and collaborative learning besides other design principles. Moreover, more than a third of the chatbots were evaluated with experiments, and the results primarily point to improved learning and subjective satisfaction. Challenges and limitations include inadequate or insufficient dataset training and a lack of reliance on usability heuristics. Future studies should explore the effect of chatbot personality and localization on subjective satisfaction and learning effectiveness

Rexy, a configurable application for building virtual teaching assistants

In recent years, virtual assistants gained a pervasive role in many domains and education was not different from others. However, although some implementation of conversational agents for supporting students have already been presented, they were ad hoc systems, built for specific courses and impossible to generalize. Also, there is a lack of research about the effects that the development of systems capable of interacting with both the students and the professors would have. In this paper, we introduce Rexy, a configurable application that can be used to build virtual teaching assistants for diverse courses, and present the results of a user study carried out using it as a virtual teaching assistant for an on-site course held at Politecnico di Milano. The qualitative analysis of the usage that was made of the assistant and the results of a post study questionnaire the students were asked to fill showed that they see conversational agents as useful tools for helping them in their studies