With the growing preference towards faster customer service and acceptance of AI based tools in business operations throughout the region as well as globally, the global chatbot market is slated to witness a CAGR of 31% from 2018 to 2024.
In the trending era of AI, chatbot market is witnessing extraordinary growth owing to the increasing demand for smartphones and the tremendous use of messenger apps etc. The proliferation of chatbot market, especially in countries like India and China is worth a glance, which has defined Asia-Pacific as the fastest growing region in the segment.
E-commerce, food delivery services, and financial services are the key industries which have embraced Chabot technology in the past. AI & Chatbot technology is now taking the ed-tech market by storm. As per Gartner, 85% of the consumer interactions will be supported without human interaction by 2020, and chatbots are also moving towards consumer applications of AI.
Education, in particular, has greatly benefited from chatbot development. Education chatbots improve communication, increase productivity, and minimize ambiguity from interactions. New-age ed-tech platforms are now solving the next-level problems in the segment using AI and Chatbots as the engagement tools.
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Emerging trends of AI and Chatbots In Education Technology
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Automatic Essay Scoring
Providing feedback on essays is an extremely challenging task and many teachers struggle with it. On the gigantic open online courses, the problem is greater as there are generally more than 1000 students in one class. It becomes unrealistic to provide personalized feedback to written essays.
To deal with this issue, innovators have reached a solution. Today many believe there is a good chance of swapping individual feedback on essays with AI, by feeding lakhs of essays to a machine learning algorithm.
Learning Through Chatbots
Smart tutoring system is a great upshot of AI which provides a custom-made learning environment to users by analyzing their answers and the ways they approach and carry out the learning content. Likewise, chatbots with AI can turn a lecture into a series of messages to give it the appearance of a uniform chat conversation. The bot will constantly gauge the level of understanding of the user and place the subsequent part of the lecture accordingly.
Spaced Interval Learning
Reiterating previous lessons before one forgets them is a most advantageous learning mechanism – it is called ‘The Spacing Effect’.
The brainchild of a Polish innovator named, Piotr Wozniak, – a learning app built around the spacing effect can now keep track of what you learn and when you learn it. By integrating AI, the app can find out when you are about to forget information and notify you to go over it.
Enhanced Student Engagement
Instant messaging and social media are the way of life for today’s students – these platforms are what they turn to while communicating with friends, researching topics or looking for help. These tools should be used to improve the learning process and commitment of students in academics. Messaging by teachers and students to connect to the classroom, departments, alumni groups, and various activity clubs are emerging fast – making it easy for students to locate information about coursework, deadlines or any other important affairs.
Conversational Course Assessments & Student Ratings
Student evaluation of teaching-survey is about 100 years old. In spite of transitioning from paper to online, there has hardly been any development in making the feedback methods more efficient. However, with new age tech innovations like AI-driven chatbots, machine learning, and natural language processing, lots of stimulating opportunities are emerging to look at within the teacher-feedback-space.
Chatbots can accumulate opinions in the course of a conversational interface with identical advantages as a ‘real’ interview but with very little effort. The conversation can be customized depending on the responses and persona of the students; it can ask follow-up questions and discover the reasons behind outlooks. It is also possible to separate personal insults and profanity which sometimes figure in teacher ratings.
Chatbots bring numerous other advantages for teachers who want to improve their competence in teaching. By taking into consideration added data sources including self-assessment, grades, peer feedback, and the latest articles on how to teach efficiently, teachers can create a more nuanced image of teaching performance.
Efficient Teaching Assistants
All over the world students are seen to put-up ‘do my assignment requests’ on the web in order to find assistance in carrying out the assignments or clearing the doubts about the same. In the same way, today’s educators might also need support to make their hectic schedules easier. These days, bots are extensively used as virtual teaching assistants to do the routine jobs of the teachers.
Bots are often used to respond to students’ queries about course components, lesson plans, assignments, and due dates. Bots can also keep an eye on the progress of the students, provide feedback to the students, analyze the learning needs and suggest learning contents accordingly.
Instant Help to Students
This is a generation of people who never stop. Technology has enabled the students to get everything instantly. Whether it is sending an email, posting a picture, searching for a place or even finding online assignment help, everything can be done in just a few clicks. Hence, the educational institutions also need to speed up their student communication process to draw the attention of this fast-paced generation.
Every year a huge amount of prospective students visit the college websites or administration offices to inquire about the admission process, scholarships or course fees. Since most questions are repetitive, chatbots can be used to convert this time-consuming task of replying to each query personally into an automatic one.
This would not only save a great deal of time of the students but would also diminish the burden of the institutions. Moreover, the students would not have to wait for getting the reply and can participate in instant chats with these bots.
Student-Centered Feedback
Innovators are constantly investigating newer educational models which will be student-centered where learner’s individuality and interest are the most critical factors in designing the curriculum for him/her. The content that acclimatizes to individual’s learning speed and places increasingly harder problems to speed up the learning proves as the student starts to grasp better and faster. This ensures that both the fast and slow learners can work at their own pace without being disheartened by others. It’s also feasible for an AI-driven course module to predict potential trouble areas and present more exercises related to it in order to avert eventual struggles.
Better Student Support
Chatbots can present great value by helping students in their admission processes, providing the required information on courses, modules, and faculties. Bots can also play the role of a campus guide and help students while they turn up at the campus. They can also assist students in finding out more about scholarships, hostel facilities, library memberships, so on and so forth.
Chatbots can even be used beyond smoothing the process of students’ requests. As students interact with chatbots, the bot gathers lots of info. This data comprises huge information regarding students’ likings and their reaction on the information they can or cannot find on the website.
The colleges and universities can make use of this data to track the students’ questions and spot the areas of improvement – like the need for improving the interface of the website or adding a new web page concerning a different topic.
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