Poster: The Use of a Virtual Personal Assistant (FENNChat) as a Platform for Providing Automated Responses to ODL Students’ Queries at UNISA

Abstract

Virtual personal assistants (VPAs) are increasingly becoming and exponentially colonising our everyday lives. In this instance, VPAs have different names, two examples of which are conversational agents and intelligent personal assistants (Bohouta and Këpuska 2018; Garcia Brustenga et al. 2018; Knote et al. 2019; Krassmann et al. 2018). Traditionally, they serve either as text-based or voice-based dialogue (conversational) systems, or as a combination of both. Against this backdrop, the current paper focuses on one prototype of a VPA, called FENNChat, that is intended to offer automated responses to students enrolled in a module, English for Academic Purposes (ENN103F). The latter is an undergraduate module offered by the Department of English Studies at the University of South Africa (UNISA), which is an open and distance e-learning (ODeL) university. This module is one of the modules whose enrolment figure is often above 10,000 students. As a prototype, FENNChat is intended to provide responses to three types of student queries: module administrative queries, module content queries, and frequently asked questions (FAQs).