Abstract:

This paper reviews the use of chatbots on Microsoft Teams (MS Teams) in several subjects at a tertiary institution in Hong Kong. A chatbot is a piece of software that communicates with users on a particular subject and is text-based, turn-based, and task-fulfilling (Jain et al., 2018; Smutny and Schreiberova, 2020). In the last year chatbots have been very much in the news with the public launch of ChatGPT. The chatbot on MS Teams is much more traditional and does not have the natural language capabilities of ChatGPT. However, it can be tailored to answer specific questions from students about a particular subject or assessment. It is also relatively straightforward to build for a non-technical teaching staff, and is available at a relatively low cost for institutions which already subscribe to MS Teams in education.

The chatbot is created using Power Virtual Agents which is an app available within Microsoft Teams. As a teacher, I am able to add the Power Virtual Agents app from the Microsoft Teams app store and begin to create, author, test, and publish the chatbot directly into teams, all within the Microsoft Teams interface. Microsoft highlights potential business uses for the chatbot, including: someone in the payroll department creates a chatbot that helps teammates get tax filing forms and information, or the facilities manager creates a chatbot that answers the common questions they are receiving about coming back to work after a pandemic. I have adapted the chatbot so that it can answer common questions from students about the subject requirements, assessments, and extra services available for students.

The paper will first review the technical requirements for running the chatbot on MS teams. It will then look at the structure of the chatbot questions and answers, before reporting on the feedback from students and teachers who used the chatbot. A mixed-methods approach is adopted to evaluate the feedback from both teachers and students. Surveys were conducted with students to examine their attitudes towards chatbots, and these were supplemented with focus group meetings with staff and students. Notes from these meetings were analysed and help to provide more perspective and ideas to supplement / triangulate the quantitative data collected from the surveys.

This presentation will be useful for teachers who are already using MS Teams and want to further exploit its functionality, and who are interested in automating some of the processes in their subjects.

References:
[1] Jain, M., Kumar P., Kota R., and Patel, S. (2018) Evaluating and informing the design of chatbots. In: Proceedings of the 2018 on designing interactive systems conference 2018, Hong Kong, China, 9–13 June 2018, pp.895–906.
[2] Smutny P. and Schreiberova P. (2020) Chatbot for learning: A review of educational chatbots for the facebook messenger. Computers & Education 151: 1–11.

Keywords:

AI, Chatbots, language learning, technology.