{"id":3319,"date":"2017-11-21T12:59:29","date_gmt":"2017-11-21T12:59:29","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2026-10-27T10:32:15","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T10:32:15","slug":"use-chatbots-e-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/capytech.com\/en\/blog\/use-chatbots-e-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Use Chatbots in E-Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"

How to Use Chatbots in E-Learning<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Chatbots are becoming more and more common in our lives. Personal assistant chatbots, for example, are all around us. You might have Siri on your Phone, Cortana on your computer, and Alexa on the Amazon Echo device sitting on your kitchen counter. In addition, more and more companies are deploying chatbots to provide technical support or to help with the sales process. What about chatbots and e-learning, though?<\/p>\n

You can enhance your e-learning courses with the chatbot technology that exists today. In addition, there are developments that will become available in the future that will make e-learning chatbots even more powerful and useful.<\/p>\n

What Are Chatbots in E-Learning?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Let\u2019s first explore what chatbots are. Chatbots are computer programmes that converse with people to achieve a particular goal. This conversation can be by voice or text chat. Basic chatbots have predetermined conversation pathways but more advanced versions use artificial intelligence, i.e. the chatbot improves with each human interaction.<\/p>\n

In e-learning, you can use chatbots to provide a more personalised experience. When used properly, they can replace some of the functions that would have been traditionally performed by a course tutor in a classroom environment.<\/p>\n

Not only do chatbots replace these functions, they do them better. This is because chatbots are more accurate than people at many tasks. In addition, a chatbot can have a meaningful conversation with hundreds or thousands of people at the same time whereas a tutor can only have one conversation at a time.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s look at some of the uses for chatbots that you can deploy now.<\/p>\n

Personalised Learning Pathway<\/strong><\/h2>\n

One of the great benefits of e-learning is you can structure the course to cater for learners with different needs and abilities. In other words, learners can do some modules and not others and\/or they can progress through modules at varying speeds.<\/p>\n

A chatbot can help ensure a learner progresses along the right pathway, doing the modules they need while progressing through parts of the course they are comfortable with quickly. This usually takes the form of the chatbot having a conversation with the learner to get an understanding of their abilities.<\/p>\n

Crucially, the answers the learner gives can determine which question the chatbot asks next. This lets it build a comprehensive picture of the learner as well as devising a highly personalised learning pathway.<\/p>\n

In the future, chatbots with artificial intelligence will continue to monitor the progress of the learner, assessing whether the pathway needs to be altered. A situation where this might occur, for example, is when a learner overestimates or underestimates their ability during the initial conversation with the chatbot.<\/p>\n

Tutor\u2019s Assistant<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Learners regularly need to ask questions and, usually, those questions are very similar. Often the questions are administrative but there can also be content-related questions as well. Very often the answers to these questions can be found in the material you provide, but for various reasons, learners still ask them.<\/p>\n

Chatbots can handle these commonly asked questions. From the learners’ perspective, the experience<\/a> can be just like talking to a person. There are many examples of this, including one developed by computer science professor Ashok Goel for his students at Georgia Tech in the US.<\/p>\n

He named the chatbot Jill Watson as he developed it using IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence platform. He didn’t tell his students Jill was a computer programme, though, and they didn’t discover the difference until they finished their exams.<\/p>\n

Course Feedback<\/strong><\/h2>\n

It\u2019s also possible to use chatbots to get more meaningful and actionable feedback from learners who complete your courses. Again, this is because chatbots have the ability to respond to answers in different ways. For example, they can explore a learner\u2019s answer in more depth if it will help with future course and learner development.<\/p>\n

Artificial Intelligence: the Future of Chatbots and E-Learning<\/strong><\/h2>\n

While the above uses of chatbots in e-learning are powerful in themselves, developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning will make them even more useful. Here are two examples:<\/p>\n