Abstract:

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we can identify that all the actions of education and training for students have changed radically. Everything had to move from the physical environment to the online environment. The move of the educational activities in the online environment has brought with it a series of changes for which there was no prior preparation and that is why the online learning system has gone through a process of digital transformation and continuous improvement during this period as well.

Changing the way of how the training sessions are delivered has involved adapting the ever-changing needs of societies, pupils, students, teachers, and instructors in order to manage the high level of disruption that represents the new normal during the pandemic.

An analysis was made regarding the digital education in different faculties allowed the identification of several problems but also identifying some solutions to address these problems. One of the problems that were identified is the situation in which during online exams, interruptions of some functionalities of the eLearning platform (such as submission process, the load of questions) and the need to intervene to resolve this unplanned incident during an extremely short time and for different users simultaneously: some interruptions are caused by a global issue that affects all the users and the intervention to remediate the situation usually is easier than in the case in which those interruptions are caused by local issues that affect a user or multiple users (in this last case, the local issues can vary between users).

In such situations, the incident management process comes into the discussion in order to be able to have a minimal impact for the incidents not foreseen with this service, as well as to ensure faster support and remediation when an incident occurs.

Therefore, this paper takes as a particular case of investigation and analysis the situation in which the students had to send their solutions to the exam in a certain time set by the teacher and due to a malfunction of the eLearning service required the manual intervention of a present virtual administrator to try to restore the service so that students are able to submit papers in a timely manner. As the incident involved the application of steps to resolve each student situation, this led to the inability to resolve all incidents in a timely manner.

In this case, the method proposed in this paper to solve the situation mentioned earlier is to create an incident management process in order to prevent some incidents, but also in order to be able to find the resolution of incidents faster and more efficiently. Moreover, incident management integrates a chatbot that provides support for students simultaneously (that faces any kind of issue) in order to remediate an incident. The chatbot supports speech and text inputs and generates phonetic and visual outputs.

In addition, the paper compares and analyzes the current situation in cases in which the incident management process is not implemented into the online education services, with cases in which the proposed incident management is implemented.

Keywords:

Incident Management, Chatbot, Digital Transformation, COVID-19, Improvement.