Pre-Conference Workshop—Chatbot Tutors for Blended Learning: Why Bother? And Where to Start?

摘要

Creating a pedagogical agent requires complex computer programming skills and it is usually built from scratch to fit the intended educational purpose. This makes it difficult for teachers to adapt existing systems or to attempt in creating a similar version. Recently, we have leveraged the IBM Watson Assistant chatbot engine to develop some chatbots. These chatbots have been adopted in a common core (general education) course for inquiry-based learning, with a promising outcome. In this workshop, we would like to share our experience gained from developing a set of chatbots for an online blended learning environment. Through the workshop, attendees will identify what and how chatbots can be designed for their own blended or fully online courses. They will also develop a simple chatbot system that can responses to some assessment inquiries.