Abstract:

In order to prevent COVID-19 infection, the Japanese government issued the state of emergency all over the country in April, 2020. The important instruction is “Avoid the three Cs”! Which means to avoid Closed spaces, Crowded places and Close-contact settings. Students cannot go to school or take lectures in classrooms. Instead, most universities used the web meeting tools such as Zoom and Webex for their students to take lectures at home. In our institute, classes started as on line on April 20. All classes in the first semester of 2020 became on line. Since the emergency warning was canceled temporarily, the on-line class and the class in a classroom were carried out by turns biweekly in the second semester of 2020. The emergency warning was repeated intermittently and caused trouble in the PBL (Project-Based Learning) classes in which group activities in the classroom were indispensable. In the on-line group work using Zoom, there were a few members who did not participate in group discussion positively while the burden concentrated on other members of the group.

Based on the on-line PBL experience and the survey of AI (Artificial Intelligence), we carried out the trial of AI chatbot and AI minute system to raise students’ participating volition and willingness to learn. In AI chatbot, AI extracted key words in the question and found related materials which best fits the question from the database. Students could ask questions even after class hours. AI minute system recorded the group discussion, recognized who spoke and extracted key words of the discussion so that teacher could check the minute afterword and facilitate the group work.

The AI minute system helped teachers to grasp the status of the group activities and encourage students to speak during the group discussion. Although changes of students’ consciousness were seen, the problem on a system was also revealed. It is hard to prepare the Q&A data for chatbot which best fit students’ questions. If voices are not loud enough or multiple students speak at a time, it is hard for the AI minute system to determine who speaks what.

Keywords:

PBL (Project-Based Leaning), AI (Artificial Intelligence), COVID-19, on-line, e-learning.