Chatbots in education : A passing trend or a valuable pedagogical tool?

Abstract

Digitalizing education and reinventing the learning experience is one of the big challenges in this age of information. In the eld of E-learning, the application of a chatbot as part of the education has shown interesting potential, both as a teaching and administrative tool. Chatbots have been 'trending' for a few years and quite a few papers examining it in the educational sector has been published, albeit very little interest seems to have been given to the summation of this knowledge. In an attempt to fill the knowledge gap this thesis performed a literature study to examine the documented features and possible uses for chatbots in an educational context. Since quite a few chatbot technologies have been developed at this time and exhibit varied functions, this study was limited to only examine bots based on the XML derived language AIML. The results imply that chatbots in education have quite a few uses and even more possible features. An AIML-based chatbot can be both simple and complex to implement, all depending on the effort put into implementation. The tool is diverse and may be used for many different purposes and aims, the only limitation being the creators' creativity and imagination.