At Day 2 of the conference, experts discussed how artificial intelligence can help create meaningful student connections.
Most people have experienced it at least once: that tone of disapproval in the voice of the person calling about a missed credit card payment or doctor’s appointment — or, for college students, academic coursework.
Enter chatbots and the complete objectivity with which they operate.
“One of the most powerful pieces … is that students will ask it questions they would never ask another human being, because it’s a bot,” Elizabeth Adams, associate vice president for undergraduate studies at California State University, Northridge, told online attendees at an Oct. 28 session of the EDUCAUSE 2020 Annual Conference. “They’re grateful to it for providing them the answers they need without saying, ‘You should have known that.’ It’s a place they can turn that’s judgment-free.”
With 40,000 students, many of them first-generation college students, CSUN had long relied on email as its official form of communication. However, Adams said, those emails too often went unanswered. “It’s not official if no one reads it,” she said, “no matter what it says.”