When you are brand new on campus and everything is confusing who can you turn to for help? Need to ask a question about your course but your tutor isn’t around? Maybe AI (Artificial Intelligence) can help.
Bolton College identified challenges arising from the nature of their study programmes which means that student often lack ‘on-demand’ access to staff, including teachers, tutors, mentors, coaches and careers advisors. To address this, they created a digital assistant in the form of a chatbot called ‘Ada.’ Ada has been assisting students with everyday enquiries since 2017 and can respond to questions about studies and curriculum topics, work placements and employability.
This project will expand the service Ada provides, allowing every student at the college access to Ada via an iOS or Android smartphone, developing an automatic marking service to improve each student’s final evaluation of their work placement programme and creating an Ada service for teachers, to demonstrate how chatbots can be used to support teachers by reducing the workload associated with day-to-day tasks required to support students in their care. Eventually, Bolton College hope to offer Ada to schools, colleges and universities across the UK, through an annual subscription service.
