Points of failure analysis

Following a literature review, the most common concerns identified for e-learning were:

• The sense of isolation and feeling of loss for the learners
• The overall lack of communication with tutors and other students
• The fact that tutors cannot attend to everyone
• Ineffective & unadapted course designs because tutors are not adapting the content to the platform
• Some inadequate and confusing learning platforms
• Tutors and learners being out of touch with the technology

Possible solution

What are conversational agents?

Good question! Conversational agents, more commonly known as chatbots or assistants, are a special kind of program that make use of natural language processing and machine learning to converse with users online. They are already being deployed in a variety of fields but are still mostly used in sales and marketing. A lot of websites and applications use them nowadays so you may have already interacted with one before.

OK, but why chatbots for e-learning?

Chatbots can help solve several of the problems that learners and also tutors face:

• They can be used to provide an interactive learning experience to increase engagement
• They can also mirror the relationship between a tutor and tutee
• Learners tend feel less complexed than when facing a human and are more likely to ask the bot questions
• The bots can also be ran 24/7 over many channels making them perfectly scalable
• Most people are already used to chatting over chatrooms so they'll feel right at home

Through the way it replies and its behaviour, it can also be made to implement the 5C frameworks mentioned earlier.

The chatbot can use the same methodology as traditional dialogue-based intelligent teaching systems in which the system gives out a lesson and has the learner answer a series of questions based on it afterwards. In a nutshell, chatbots understand users by deriving the overall Intent from the user's message and the Entities as parameters, based on the current Context. To assert the answer to a question, all the bot has to do is check if the user's intent and entites match the correct answer for the current context. Using this method, they can be used to teach a large variety of subject. Modern chabots also have a variety of tools in their arsenal with rich replies. Rich replies enables them to not only send simple text, but also voice messages, images, videos, tables,... They can also dynamically look over internet for answers to a learner's question, though this increases the complexity.

Sure, but how would it teach?

Intents, entities, context, rich replies… All of this sounds complicated...

Complicated you say? Not anymore! Thanks to giant cloud providers such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, or IBM, it has actually become possible to build and deploy sophisticated chatbots while writing little to no code and at a very low cost.

Can I see a few examples?

Alright, thank you Fredbot. That was very informative.

Hello, my name is Fredbot and today I will walk you through this presentation on e-learning and chatbots

Research aim

• Despite a 29% growth in student enrollment in 2020 it is predicted that there will be a 6,1% decline in market value for self-paced learning until 2021 (Tamm 2020)
• An edX study estimated that only 3,13% of registrants completed their courses in 2017-18 (Lederman 2019)

The aim of this research is to find out why current e-learning platforms are failing to retain their learners and how they could be upgraded. It ultimately lead to the following research question:

How can current e-learning platforms be upgraded to improve learner engagement and retention?

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my appreciation to my assigned supervisor Dr. Frederick Kofi de Heer-Menlah for his valuable and constructive suggestions during the planning and development of this research work. I would also like to thank Dr. Govindha Yeluripati and all the teaching staff at Lancaster University Ghana.

References

• Pappas, C. (2019) Top 20 eLearning Statistics For 2019 - eLearning Industry (2019). Available at: https://elearningindustry.com/top-elearning-statistics-2019 .
• Tamm, S (2020) 100 Essential E-Learning Statistics for 2020 | E-Student (2020). Available at: https://e-student.org/e-learning-statistics/ .
• Lederman, D (2019) Study offers data to show MOOCs didn't achieve their goals | Inside Higher Ed (2020). Available at: https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/01/16/study-offers-data-show-moocs-didnt-achieve-their-goals.
• Bawa, P. (2016). Retention in Online Courses: Exploring Issues and Solutions—A Literature Review Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244015621777
• Chakor, YA. El Faddouli, NE. (2016). Abandonment of Learners MOOC Problematic Analysis and Proposed Solutions. Available at: https://www.ijcaonline.org/archives/volume153/number2/chakor-2016-ijca-911977.pdf
• Kaplan, A. Haenlein, M (2016). Higher education and the digital revolution: About MOOCs, SPOCs, social media, and the Cookie Monster. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303357021_Higher_education_and_the_digital_revolution_About_MOOCs_SPOCs_social_media_and_the_Cookie_Monster
• Olney, A. M. (2018). Using novices to scale up intelligent tutoring systems. Available at: https://olney.ai/category/2018/11/27/braintrust-iitsec.html
• Tamayo, P. Herrero, A. Martín, J. (2020) Design of a chatbot as a distance learning assistant Available at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1260231.pdf .
• Adamopoulou, E. and Moussiades, L. (2020) "An Overview of Chatbot Technology", IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, pp. 373-383. https://doi:10.1007/978-3-030-49186-4_31
• Suta, P. Lan, X. Wu, B. Mongkolnam, P. Chan, J. (2020) An Overview of Machine Learning in Chatbots Available at: http://www.ijmerr.com/uploadfile/2020/0312/20200312023706525.pdf .
• Blackburn, G. (2019). How Chatbots Could Be The Future Of Learning. Available at: https://elearningindustry.com/chatbots-future-learning .
• Wilson, A. (2020) 5 Ways Chatbots Can Help Students in Distant Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic - The Chatbot, The Chatbot. Available at: https://thechatbot.net/chatbots-students-covid-19/
• Colace, F et al. (2018) Chatbot for E-Learning: A Case of Study. Available at: http://www.ijmerr.com/uploadfile/2018/0831/20180831043721869.pdf .
• https://dialogflow.cloud.google.com
• https://www.botcopy.com
• Avatar made using https://avatarmaker.com

My pleasure

Fredbot has exited the conversation