A chatbot for educational institutions is not a new concept. The 2020 pandemic expedited the digital transformation of educational institutions, and the digitalization wave is still ongoing. 42% of higher education institutions have already integrated chatbots, while 60% of schools are planning to integrate them within the next two years.
Educational chatbots can streamline administrative activities, improve student engagement, and enhance the learning environment. 59% of students consider chatbots to improve their academic performance, while 68% of teachers want to use chatbots as teaching assistants. So what is the true potential of an educational chatbot? This guide will closely look at educational chatbots, covering its benefits, use cases, and steps to build one easily. So let's get started.
Part 1: What is an Educational Chatbot?
An educational chatbot is a conversational bot powered mainly by artificial intelligence (AI). It is used by universities, EdTech companies, schools, and other institutions.
An educational chatbot can act as a virtual assistant and help students with the application process, course inquiries, course modules, learning activities, and more. Furthermore, it helps teachers and administrative staff optimize activities and avoid frequent student queries.
In short, a chatbot for educational institutions plays a vital role in optimizing the learning experience and communication between students and institutions.
Part 2: Benefits of AI Chatbot for Educational Institutions
An AI-powered chatbot for educational institutions offers many benefits to both students and faculty members.
Some of the key benefits of an educational chatbot are as follows:
1. Multilingual 24/7 Student Support
The first and dominant benefit of an educational chatbot is its anywhere, anytime accessibility in multiple languages. Whether it's 1 am at night or 2 pm at noon, the chatbot is readily available to assist students and provide prompt responses in their preferred language.
Furthermore, the chatbot can also help self-learning with interactive experiences, like quizzes, flashcards, and more. In short, a chatbot for educational institutions can help students access needed information anytime and have an uninterrupted experience.
2. Crawling the Entire Faculty List
An educational chatbot facilitates self-service queries for teacher office locations and email addresses as per publicly available information on the official website. Students can easily access the information with simple prompts instead of wasting time searching for relevant information or contacting the administrative department.
3. Easy Access to Admission and Enrollment Information
Students always have many queries about admission paperwork, course details, fee structure, etc. Instead of visiting the institution to get answers or waiting long to get replies through emails, an educational chatbot can provide instant answers.
A chatbot for educational institutions can help with queries related to:
- Admission paperwork
- Fee structure and financial aid
- Course enrollment and details
- Campus life
In short, it provides a convenient platform for students to resolve their queries instantly. This also lowers the administrative team's workload.
4. Connecting with Associations and Clubs
An AI chatbot for educational institutions is also handy for connecting students with campus associations and clubs. It can provide information related to membership details, upcoming events, and more. This helps make students more engaged with campus life.
5. Assistance with Content Creation
An educational chatbot can assist students in content creation. To better understand, consider that students are assigned an assignment to create presentations. They can ask the chatbot to provide an outline of the presentation. Secondly, they can get help optimizing their content and other assistance to develop compelling presentations. This improves their content creation skills and makes them maximize their learning potential.
6. Integration with Multiple Platforms
A chatbot for educational institutions can integrate with multiple platforms. It can integrate with the institute website, WhatsApp, and other platforms. This makes chatbots easily accessible to students through their preferred communication channels.
7. Cost-effectiveness
An educational chatbot provides significant financial benefits to an educational institute. It reduces the need for a large administrative team and the number of frequently asked queries. This helps the admin team to handle more complex issues and work on further optimizing the experience for students.
8. Easy Scalability
As the educational institution grows, there will be more queries from students. An educational chatbot can handle more queries without asking for more resources. It can tackle multiple queries at once and ensure that all students are entertained promptly.
9. Better Student Engagement
An educational chatbot helps improve student engagement. This engagement can be seen in two ways, as evident from the above points. First, the chatbot can streamline the admission process and help students complete the application process seamlessly. Second, it can facilitate a smooth learning experience. It can grab students' attention and make learning interactive and exciting. This increases students' engagement with studies and improves their educational journey.
Part 3: Examples of Educational Chatbots
Educational chatbots are already in action across hundreds of institutions. So, let's highlight a few real-world educational chatbot examples:
Pounce Chatbot of Georgia State University
Georgia State University has introduced Pounce, an AI-powered chatbot for students. It assists them during the enrollment process. It can help in admissions, financial aid, and other enrollment activities. The randomized controlled trial (RCT) by Mainstay showed that out of the 50,000+ messages received by Pounce, only 1% needed help from the Georgia State staff. The rest of the 99% of queries were handled by Pounce. In short, Pounce reduced the burden on on-campus staff and reduced the number of students dropping out due to lack of information.
Beacon Chatbot of Staffordshire University
Staffordshire University offers students a 24/7 chatbot called Beacon. It acts as a digital coach app that is accessible through the web and smartphones. It can provide information about student timetables, search the staff directory, browse news and events, answer FAQs, request documents, and more.
Beacon reduces the administrative burden and helps students quickly get the necessary information. This saves students significant time, improves student life, and helps them focus more on learning activities.
Duolingo's Chatbot
Duolingo is a well-reputed language-learning platform that has leveraged AI chatbot technology to make language learning more interactive. It can simulate real-life scenarios to engage users in realistic talks and improve their language skills.
Duolingo has recently introduced Duolingo Max powered by GPT-4. It enhances the personalized learning experience further with two new features, i.e., Explain My Answer and Roleplay. The chatbot provides personalized feedback, which helps learners fix mistakes and improve their understanding.
QuizBot
QuizBot is a web-based AI quiz builder tool for creating quizzes on specific topics. It helps students and tutors create quizzes from eBooks, websites, or any content type on a wide range of topics.
Part 4: Build Educational Chatbots With GPTBots
There is an assumption that building an educational chatbot requires the help of IT experts. However, it is a simple click-based process using the right bot builder platform. That's what you can experience with GPTBots.
GPTBots s a no-code AI bot platform for building chatbots for educational institutions. It provides an easy-to-use web interface and can efficiently train with your institute's data.
With GPTBots, you can create an educational chatbot to assist enrollments, answer FAQs, facilitate personalized learning, and more. It also provides a flow-based visual interface for creating more sophisticated chatbots.
The key features of the GPTBots platform are as follows:
- Easy-to-use platform to build a multilingual chatbot with no code involved.
- Trainable with various data formats, including PDF, Docs, website, XLS, CSV, etc.
- Flow-based visual interface to build complex chatbots.
- Pre-designed templates to build chatbots quickly.
- Integrate with various platforms, including WhatsApp, Zapier, Slack, Discord, and more.
- Support student's input in the form of text, audio, images, videos, etc.
Here are the four simple steps to build a chatbot with GPTBots:
- Step 1. Create a Bot:
Head to the GPTBots.ai website and sign up. From the home screen, click "New Bot" and choose "Create from Blank" or a pre-designed template.
Configure the bot settings, including large language model (LLM) response length, and more. Also, completely specify the chatbot role, tasks, and skills under the "Identity Prompt". - Step 2. Import Data:
Go to Knowledge > Documents and upload all the data you want to use to train the bot. You can upload files, spreadsheets, website URLs, Google Drive links, FAQs, and more. - Step 3. Test Response:
Go back to the “Config” panel and use the “Debug” mode to begin chatting and testing the bot. Click the “Train” icon to edit answers where required. - Step 4. Launch and Go Live:
Once the design process is completed, go to the "Integrations" panel and publish/integrate the chatbot to your preferred channels, such as WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, and more. After integrating, students can begin using the chatbot.
This way, you can easily build a full-fledged chatbot for educational institutions. So why think more? Head to GPTBots.ai and get started!
Conclusion
Educational chatbots provide instant information that students need to complete enrollment tasks or get assistance in learning activities. Many students now consider chatbots the first priority when they need help. Therefore, it is essential for educational institutions to implement chatbots to offer students and faculty the modernized assistance they need. GPTBots makes that super-easy with its intuitive platform for building complete educational chatbots. So sign up with GPTBots today and start enhancing your educational environment with AI technology.
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