Transforming personal tutoring and supporting student success with chatbots

Session Outline

Every year a huge amount of prospective students visit university websites to enquire about the admission process, scholarships, personal tutoring or fees. Since many questions are repetitive, chatbots can be used to convert this time-consuming task of replying to each query personally into an automatic one. Now you can transform personal tutoring the same way!

Nowadays, chatbots are being used in practically every industry and with the increasing use of technology in everyday life, it is changing the way students learn and absorb information. For higher education, chatbots act as an essential conversational tool, built to improve student interaction and collaboration, enhancing human-to-human communication; but never fully replacing it.

This session will feature a tactical roadmap of how you can bring a chatbot to your campus to maximise engagement with students and how you can leverage specialist chatbots for individual departments, including personal tutoring. We will discuss how chatbots and personal tutors can work hand-in-hand to provide a convenient experience for the students. For example, if the student wants to ask ‘what physics courses are available next semester?’ the bot can send a link to the appropriate webpage. If they ask a question that the bot is unable to answer, such as ‘I’m struggling with my Psychology course this semester, should I drop it?’, the bot can ask if the student would like to speak to the tutor themselves. The session will explore in detail how universities can harness the power of chatbot technology to not only meet digital expectations of their students, but to provide them with better, more enriched experiences and ultimately support student success.

Key takeaways:

• Learn how your institution can leverage chatbots and humans, working together in personal tutoring
• Gain an understanding of how chatbots can answer the non-complex, repetitive questions leaving more time for the tutors to focus on how they can add value to the conversation and build a developmental relationship with the student, which supports the student to personalise their learning to their own needs
• Learn how chatbots in tutoring can provide answers 24/7, every day of the year, handling after-hour FAQs when tutors have gone home
• Learn how you can extract tons of institutional knowledge from brains, systems, and processes, then use that information to engage students 24/7
• Understand how your institution can launch a fully functioning chatbot in a week
• Learn how we simplify the jargon around chatbots
• Learn how other institutions are using chatbots from our most recent results and examples