Chatbots in education are a rising trend: Why?

We typically associate chatbots with pop-ups intended to connect with customers. Whether it is the IRCTC ticket booking website or a cab booking app, automated chats with pre-set answers are supposed to make a buying experience better. But now a lot of educational institutes are using it too, with increasing success. Let’s find out why this is happening.    

AI enabled chatbots can collect important student data  
In the AI enabled chatbot market, the most sought-after application is the automated, intelligent tutoring system that provides an automated chat assisted learning environment. Student’s responses and their patterns of interaction with the AI learning content reveal precious data about the level of involvement, degree of comprehension, difficulties, and thought progression per module. The chatbot gives the feel of a regular IM conversation to the student, though the responses are made up of chunks from the lecture. The response of the student indicates whether this lecture material is working well or not.  

Chatbots have increased interaction and attention levels of students  
Students have a problem of decreasing attention span in a world dominated by smartphone content. The chatbot is interactive, so it’s a better idea than just accessing an online module and reading through it passively. Besides, students are used to a mode of virtual conversation involving emoticons, uploaded files, link sharing etc., which are all chatbot features too. So they find chatbots familiar and convenient for discussing study matters.  

Chatbots can provide immediate automated feedback  
An important aspect of any learning process is feedback. A chatbot is created to provide immediate automated feedback to students. Even if they know it’s coming from a robot, students feel encouraged by this. The teacher finds it immensely helpful too, because student feedback received via the bot tells him or her whether the study material has been useful.

Chatbots are teaching assistants and student scheduler   
Once the daily grind of routine tasks are taken off a teacher’s shoulder, he or she can concentrate more on in-depth teaching, providing individual time to students, and thinking over study material. Chatbots perform the role of teaching assistants who perform daily tasks, while the teacher finally finds the quality time needed to achieve higher standards. Students also use the chatbot as a sort of assistan, since it’s also a scheduler. Students get submission, test and homework alerts. All this makes the chatbot really useful.