Abstract:

Higher education increasingly demands pedagogical strategies that foster structured reasoning, digital competence, and applied professional skills beyond content memorization. However, students often face difficulties when organizing complex procedural knowledge and translating theoretical frameworks into operational decision-making processes. Within a constructionist perspective integrated into a Project-Based Learning (PBL) approach, this study explores the design of student-created conversational agents as structured digital learning artefacts. Rather than functioning solely as instructional supports, chatbots were conceived as cognitive tools through which students externalized and systematized disciplinary knowledge.

The experience was implemented in two academic contexts: a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a Master’s Degree in Food Safety, Quality and Sustainability, involving approximately 80 students. Working in collaborative teams, students designed interactive chatbots using Typebot, incorporating conditional logic and structured conversational blocks tailored to a specific professional audience. Each discipline adapted the task to its professional simulation context. Master’s students developed chatbots simulating internal audit and quality management processes aligned with ISO 9001:2015 requirements, reinforcing procedural understanding of auditing stages, documentation control, and corrective actions. Undergraduate Journalism students created chatbots guiding users through structured phases of audiovisual project development, including objective definition, audience analysis, narrative planning, and production workflow.

Assessment combined a shared evaluation framework (digital competence questionnaire, analytic rubric, peer co-evaluation, and perception survey) with discipline-specific content tasks.

Results indicate increased engagement, improved capacity to structure complex content, and enhanced procedural clarity. Master’s students demonstrated clearer articulation of audit processes, while Journalism students showed improved organization of communication workflows and operational decision structures. Satisfaction surveys highlighted motivation, autonomy, collaborative learning, and perceived professional relevance.

The findings suggest that designing educational chatbots functions as a cognitively demanding structuring exercise that promotes deeper conceptual integration and professional simulation. Although further longitudinal research is needed to assess long-term learning effects, structured conversational design appears to be a transferable active-learning strategy across higher education contexts.

Acknowledgment:
This work was supported by the University of La Laguna (ULL) through the Vice-Rectorate under the “Convocatoria de Proyectos de Innovación y Transferencia Educativa 2025” (Call for Educational Innovation and Transfer Projects 2025), for the 2025–2026 and 2026–2027 academic years.

Keywords:

Chatbots, Active learning, Project-based learning, Digital competence, Higher education innovation, ISO 9001, Food quality management, Journalism education.