Tutoring Postgraduate Students with an AI-Based Chatbot

Abstract

Tutoring and counselling are essential support services universities provide to their students. With the ever-increasing number of the students, providing these functions has become harder and harder. Therefore, universities have started to use chat robots or chatbots to automate their guidance and counselling services. This paper discusses the suitability of the chatbots or virtual advisers in personal study planning and course selection in higher educational institutions. The empiric part of the study reports the observations of the experiment conducted in a Finnish university of applied sciences. In the study postgraduate students of engineering used a tailor-made chatbot while creating their personal study plans. The findings of the study indicated that chatbots could to some extent improve student counselling and the main advantages were scalability and unlimited service hours. However, students did not see that artificial intelligence could fully remove the need for human counselling. The main reported shortcomings of the chatbot were the minor significance of the individuality, lack of inspiring effect, and general negative attitude towards automated services.

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