The benefits of chatbots in the education market

Classrooms worldwide sit empty as more students are forced to learn from home, all while teachers and professors find themselves leading distance learning perhaps before they ever thought they would.

Then there are the institutions which are dealing with budget crunches from the state and federal funding side for public institutions and tuition and lodging revenue losses at private schools.

Productivity and cost efficiency are paramount now and everyone seems to be scrambling for ideas to recover. Automation through AI and bots is one obvious answer, where bots can maximize the impact of educators and minimize costs by automating manual and labor-intensive processes.

The AtBot team took some time to discuss AI possibilities in the Azure cloud with a tight-knit online community hosted by Microsoft. AtBot VP of Client Engagement Matt Wade presented at the weekly EDU-aligned MS Office Hours, talking through chatbot use cases, bot architecture, Power Platform, and how the AI technology works behind the scenes. Watch below and download the slides (opens OneDrive for Business).

Special thanks to Dave Pearlman at Microsoft and Steve Lane at Ithaca College for the invitation.

Some takeaways

Talking through some of the major aspects of bots in EDU, we discussed first and foremost use cases. Student-centered services are of course the most high-value places you can make use of a bot: whether it’s for leading the onboarding process for new students or putting in a fix request for the dorm washing machine, having a bot at your fingertips through Microsoft Teams or over text message can be a real time-saver for everyone, especially when the bots are available 24/7 (unlike humans).

Use cases abound for chatbots in education. Find the annoying business processes and you likely have a reason to jump in.

Answering common questions from students, faculty, staff, and even parents can be extremely useful too. Building knowledge bases in Azure and surfacing them through a bot is a great way to minimize emails, instant messages, and phone calls endlessly asking the same questions.

This is especially true during uncertain times like these where things change quickly and communications may not have made it to everyone yet; send everyone to a central bot to ask first before interrupting support staff who have important roles keeping things running behind the scenes. Even use the bot as the source of notifications (say, through Microsoft Teams or over text message).

But don’t just depend on FAQ. The best bots are the ones that can kick off actions automatically. Maybe it’s IT support where the bot can run students through standard troubleshooting steps for getting connected to an online class, all while opening and then closing a ticket in the background so the help desk is aware of the metrics (and efficacy). Connecting to your Microsoft and third-party cloud apps is easy through their APIs and connectors built into tools like Microsoft Power Automate.

FAQ is a great start, but use the technology to its fullest: bring logic into the game.

But don’t just look at support processes. Direct impact to students is the name of your game. So try making their lives easier by providing better access to the tools they’re already using. Your learning management system (LMS), grading portal, intranet, Teams classrooms, scholarship portal, and other apps lead to app-jumping fatigue. But a bot can bring all these things together into one place, a central chat box.

For example, imagine a student being able to ask questions about their assignments and getting status of their homework and schedules for exam — straight from their LMS — right in the student support bot. See video demo below.

And don’t forget the main reason for bringing these bots into being: the ability to interact with them using natural, human language. Ask it what you want to do using your standard vernacular, even including key words and terms that are specific to your institution. No acronymn need be left behind thanks to the language understanding tools built into Azure Cognitive Services. It can even parse a request and grab data from it to pre-populate forms and requests.

Don’t miss the opportunity to make the most of natural language processing. Skip the form; just say what you want.

And then there are people who are straight-up knocking it out of the park. Take Dr. David Kellermann from the engineering school at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He’s become the de facto standard bearer for a hyper modern classroom in the Microsoft cloud. If you haven’t watched his demo from Inspire 2019, you definitely want to.

While he’s expertly put Office 365 apps to use even beyond what many are doing today — Teams for communications and getting student questions answered, OneNote for shared lecture notes, PowerPoint for his presentations, Stream for lecture recordings, Forms for quickly building quizzes — his most innovative solution has been building a helper chatbot to supplement TA support for answering student questions; his classes are 500+ students.

Using Bot Service, LUIS, QnA Maker, and a slick Azure Machine Learning model, the bot has learned over the course of the semester what the answers to questions are, based on previous TA answers and Stream video lecture transcript access. The bot’s actually been beating TAs to the punch with accurate answers — including time-stamped links to lecture recordings — to keep students moving on their studies. The bot will be even more adept with each passing semester.

Wrap up

Now’s the time to get to work on some of those time- and labor-saving projects that had been previously shelved due to lack of priority. But priorities have shifted immensely in 2020. And in education, dollars need to go toward students, so any process that can be automated and help a student learn along the way is a good dollar spent. Azure AI and a dependable chatbot platform like AtBot can get you there quickly and efficiently.

AtBot brings AI within reach

AtBot is the premiere bot-as-a-service solution for the Microsoft cloud. Built completely within Azure, AtBot is your out-of-the-box, easy-to-configure bot for Teams, SharePoint, or the web. Teach AtBot tasks using Power Automate, make him your corporate source of knowledge with QnA Maker, help him understand almost anything your colleagues could ask thanks to LUIS, and manage his features with the AtBot Admin Portal. Get going with AtBot Free or start your free trial of AtBot Premium today.