Personalized Tutoring Through Conversational Agents

The fourth industrial revolution keeps pushing the advancement of technology in the form of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and natural language processing (NLP) which increasingly makes the use of conversational agents (such as chatbots) in education a possibility. Advanced conversational agents are powered by AI and exploit NLP to have text-based dialogues with users. A conversational agent can also make use of speech recognition technology to have a spoken conversation with a user. Developers of conversational agents design them to mimic human-like conversations in a way that is indistinguishable from having actual interaction with a human. As a result, some conversational agents are imbued with human qualities like personality, emotion and humor. AI-powered conversational agents are able to offer learning support and enable a learner to engage in self-assessment which can be difficult to provide in traditional learning environments. In addition to providing personalized learning to users, conversational agents adopt human pedagogical roles such as learning companions, coaches or tutors in educational settings. Pedagogic conversational agents also promote collaborative learning in technology-enhanced learning environments such as e-learning, online learning, massive open online courses (MOOC) and in other virtual worlds. The use of conversational agents as pedagogical agents is underscored as having the potential to enhance learning outcomes and memory and increase the motivation of learners to engage in the learning process. At the same time, it brings up discussions on academic integrity while applying such technology.