Abstract:

Teaching and learning are part of a single process that aims to train students. Given the permanent nature of this process, it is necessary to establish various modalities and spaces for student service in open and flexible times. In this context, it is helpful for students to have online consultation materials and a list of questions and answers that frequently arise within a given context and for a particular topic. The objective of this work is to present a teaching experience that seeks to help students in their learning process, through the construction and use of a virtual assistant, as a tool aimed at stimulating and motivating autonomous learning.

Some advantages we hope to achieve with the use of a virtual assistant are:
i) provide personalized help to students, at any time and any day and
ii) through the interaction between assistant and student, direct her/him towards the most relevant aspects in the learning of a subject.

These virtual assistants can help students during their learning process, transforming teaching material into a series of messages that form a conversation. Our idea is to take advantage of the capacity of these programs and create ECRA (Spanish acronym for Artificial Conversational Entity for the Reinforcement of Learning) a virtual assistant with which students can have conversations to answer questions about a subject. In this way, what we seek is that the students have an aid that allows them to face the learning of the syllabus in an interactive and decisive way. With the traditional teaching method, students have to ask questions in class or attend tutorials to solve their doubts, which for many is a problem. With a virtual assistant, students could access to it from any device (Smartphone, Tablet or PC) and solve their doubts instantaneously and remotely. Specifically, we set the aim of building a chatbot that performs the functions of a virtual assistant (as a learning reinforcement aid) for the Intelligent Systems subject that is currently taught in the second year of the Degree in Computer Science.

As stages necessary to achieve the aim set, we first have to select a platform that allows the development of chatbots. Next, we need to have a method that allows us to develop the virtual assistant from the teaching materials used in a subject. This combination of platform and method will be what makes it possible for the assistant to be a tool for reinforcing learning.

Once the assistant has been built, it will be available at all times and be accessible through any device and also will be integrated into a virtual teaching system. Our purpose is to inquire about the study habits and organization that students apply, seeking to provide answers, or at least indications, to the following questions:
- How do they organize study time daily, weekly, monthly and during the semester?
- Are there differences in study habits between students who pass the subject and those who do not?

The analysis of the data on the use of ECRA collected during the teaching experience has allowed us to outline the behavior and strategies that the students adopt when they face a subject. Some lessons learned are: the use of ECRA increases coinciding with the evaluation activities on the subject, the students who pass the subject make a more constant weekly use and in the student's day-to-day, an evening study time slot appears in which she resorts to the help of the assistant.

Keywords:

Learning aid, Conversational entity, Analysis of study habits.