Enhancing the Online Student Experience Through Creating Learning Communities—The Benefits of Chatbots in Higher Education

Student engagement, or more crucially, the lack of it, is currently a massive challenge in Higher Education (Ellis in Improving Student Engagement via a Chatbot, 2019), and particularly in online HE. This situation is a result of multi-faceted drivers of student behaviour, expectations, backgrounds, needs and a whole range of other factors. Low engagement leads to a number of detrimental outcomes, such as poor results, feelings of isolation and increasing dropout rates, and is a common challenge in students transitioning from school to university (Hone and El Said in Comput Edu 98:157–168, 2016). Chatbots are increasingly being utilised to address engagement in HE institutions, particularly where resources are either dwindling or used for other matters, in response to this challenge. Traditionally, conversational agents such as chatbots were designed to meet a wide range of needs, intelligent tutoring, answering questions and learning companions (Kerry et al. in Conversational agents in E-learning, pp. 169–182, 2008). More recently, there has been a rise in the adoption of chatbots across the HE landscape (Klopfenstein et al. in The rise of bots: A survey of conversational interfaces, patterns, and paradigms, pp 555–565, 2017, Govindasamy in J Edu Multimedia Hypermedia 23:163–188, 2014), including in online courses, where they can be particularly valuable. Students are already familiar with social media and messaging platforms; chatbots extend upon this by providing students with a collaborative environment within which to communicate with each other and ask questions (Singh 2018). In this chapter, we present our plans to pilot a chatbot (Differ) for first-year undergraduate students at an HE institution comprised of a large international student base.