Students might receive a text-message related to a specific campaign, then engage with the chatbot via their phone.
Some UIA schools also don’t have a public-facing chatbot on their websites. Current students won’t need information on remote new student orientation, advanced tuition deposits, and more, so it’s important to also have a COVID website for current students to provide information relevant to the rest of the student population. Benny at Oregon State University supports newly admitted students. In other cases, UIA chatbots have a specific intended audience. If they ask how COVID might impact their financial aid, they could be presented with information on CARES Act funding. Knightbot is for financial aid, so if a student asks a general COVID question, they are referred to the university’s COVID website. Some UIA chatbots, like the University of Central Florida’s Knightbot, are unit or area specific.
COVID chatbot content varies based on use and audience.These in-house chatbots can pull content directly from campus COVID FAQ pages if integrating a vendor’s COVID information isn’t an option. This may save money, but means campus personnel will spend more time developing and maintaining the chatbot. However, some UIA schools built their own chatbots instead of using a vendor. The vendors provided schools with up-to-date health information to add to their chatbots’ knowledge bases in order to streamline responses to students. Several UIA schools have partnered with vendors like AdmitHub and Ocelot to supplement their existing chatbots with COVID-specific content. COVID content can come from chatbot vendors or from the school itself.These messages could reach students more quickly than email or notes posted to student portals, and they helped administrators respond and plan accordingly. For example, one campus solicited students’ plans for leaving residence halls via text messages from their chatbot. In addition to providing responses to frequent questions, chatbots can also share or gather information proactively from students in real time. Chatbots can initiate and share information with students.Students were most interested in: refunds (financial aid, housing, parking, tuition, etc.), financial aid/work study, grades and/or grading policies, concerns related to housing, summer/fall planning, commencement, mental health concerns, and the duration of remote learning or remote learning-specific questions. Despite differences in communication methods (text message-based chatbot, website-based chatbot, or no chatbot at all) and audiences (current student or admitted student), common themes in student questions emerged across UIA campuses. Students at different campuses are asking similar questions.Here are a few insights from a recent investigation of student chatbot use at UIA institutions during COVID. We were curious what UIA campuses were learning about how chatbots can be helpful during a health crisis – when constantly changing information, and increased demand for that information, make an efficient AI tool particularly useful. Our project has focused on the use of AI chatbots – those that rely on a dynamic knowledge base maintained by the institution and are trained to mimic human interaction.
Other chatbots provide topical buttons for users to click on, and the bot provides a short description of said topic. Ever navigated to a website in search of a piece of information, to be met by an often named piece of AI that asks if you have questions? That’s a chatbot! Some chatbots allow users to type questions into a box, and the chatbot’s knowledge base provides an answer. As it turns out, in this time of COVID-19, UIA campuses that participated in the chatbot project have found their chatbots particularly helpful in keeping students up-to-date on health information and policy changes. We wanted to understand how artificial intelligence like chatbots could improve access to information in areas like admissions, financial aid, and student services. Before the global pandemic, the UIA launched a project to scale the use of chatbot technology to support student success.
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