Educational Chatbots: A Sustainable Approach for Customizable Conversations for Education

Abstract

This paper proposes using chatbots as “tutors” in a learning environment; tutors who are not domain experts but helpers in guiding students through bodies of learning material. The most original contributions are the proposal that conversation should be content-independent (although chatbots speak about content); The production process should allow non-technical actors to customize chatbots and keep the costs of development and deployment low. We specifically discuss conversation customization, which is relevant, especially for learning applications, where users might have specific needs or problems. We achieve the features introduced above via extensive “configuration” (regarding direct programming), making the underlying technology novel and original. Experiments with teachers and students have shown that chatbots in education can be effective and that customization of conversations is relevant and valued by users.