Abstract:

Lifelong or continuous learning is becoming ever more important for professionals in today`s fast changing economic and technological landscape. It is estimated that most adults will work at a job requiring a different qualification than the one they graduated. Also, some of these qualifications did not exist at the time of their tertiary study. Furthermore, the adoption of new technologies based on artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printers, could displace entire categories of workers. However most adults do not have the time to enroll in full-fledged specialization courses.

We propose a system based on pro-active chatbots for personalized, continuous mobile learning. Mobile learning can provide a continuous access to learning material, that can be accessed by adults in their available time slots, such as breaks or commuting. However the availability of the learning resources is not an issue nowadays. The problems that our system tries to solve is tailoring the content for a specific adult and, more important, learning the availability and disposition of the learner so that targeted articles or lessons can be pushed proactively.

The medium over which content is pushed is also critical for the adoption. Mobile users have developed an “application fatigue”, being more reluctant to install yet another application with separate notifications. Chatbots use existing messaging applications such as Messenger or Skype and provide a natural language interface, easing the acceptance of sent content.

Our application profiles users based on their usage metrics, builds a library of domain-of-interest content and provides a continuous learning medium.

Keywords:

Chatbot, e-learning, lifelong learning.