Abstract:

In the last years, higher education has become more and more demanding because of goals of the Europe 2020 Strategy and more accessible because of strengthening internationalization, mobility, distance learning and open learning. A direct consequence of this is increasing number of students at the Universities. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze ways that students and Faculties interact and determine whether the solutions used in business domain can be implemented in higher education. Looking back at the business domain, using omnichanel approach has led to a significant rising of business results across different industries. The dominant channel in omnichanel approach are chatbots. There are almost no websites where they do not pop up to welcome us and offer assistance in meeting our service needs. Chatbots are increasingly in use in different business domains.

One of the potential areas where chatbots can be introduced is certainly higher education. Although higher education environment differs from the business domain, there is an extremely high potential for the application of chatbots in higher education environment. Students don’t run away from new technologies, but rather love them, they run away from traditional, slow ways of communication and procedures of solving their requirements, and seek information in a different and faster way thanks to new technologies and their availability.

Students, as a target group of users, during their education need assistance in various forms. For example, primarily in learning to understanding the difference between two concepts or in getting some particular information like knowing which classroom the next lesson is in or in the administration for fulfilling some request during academic year. Higher education environment to which chatbots can be applied is very extensive and Faculties that recognize the opportunities to incorporate chatbots institutionally will certainly have a synergistic effect.

This paper discusses the nature of applying the chatbots in a higher education environment. To be more precise, focus of paper is based on two research questions: How can chatbots be used within a typical University environment? and How to approach in designing and implementing University chatbot?.

To answer first question, paper provides a literature review examining and defining the most important aspects of applying chatbots in education such as institution management, student-chatbot interaction and chatbot roles. Opportunities and challenges, some open issues and considerations are presented too.

Since in the field of education, chatbots are used experimentally to answer second question, a case study of developing proof of concept - Chatbot on student web portal “MyFOI” at University of Zagreb, Faculty of organization and informatics (FOI) is done. The case study consists of functionality that include scenarios and main roles, architecture that describe chatbot orchestration and interaction with other systems, iterative development activities which includes artificial intelligence training; functional, user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) testing and finally best practice in our case.
The contribution of the paper is dual. On the one side provides an academic background analysing various segments of applications chatbots in University environment and from the other side is pragmatic, presenting approach and experience in developing University Chatbot in Croatia.

Keywords:

University Chatbot, Chatbot development, Higher education environment, student engaging.