Sustainability Free Full-Text Chatbots in Education and Research: A Critical Examination of Ethical Implications and Solutions

This includes activities such as establishing educational objectives, developing teaching methods and curricula, and conducting assessments (Latif et al., 2023). Considering Microsoft’s extensive integration efforts of ChatGPT into its products (Rudolph et al., 2023; Warren, 2023), it is likely that ChatGPT will become widespread soon. Educational institutions may need to rapidly adapt their policies and practices to guide and support students in using educational chatbots safely and constructively manner (Baidoo-Anu & Owusu Ansah, 2023). Educators and researchers must continue to explore the potential benefits and limitations of this technology to fully realize its potential. The latest chatbot models have showcased remarkable capabilities in natural language processing and generation.

• Rather than reacting in fearful ways to new advances in artificial intelligence, some educators have been thinking about innovative ways to use it to support student learning.
• A minimum interaction of three hours per week with each AIC, or 48 h over a month across all AICs, was requested from each participant.
• Chatbots in education serve as valuable administrative companions for both prospective and existing students.
• Authors are thankful to all the teaching staff from the Regional Center for Education and Training Professions of Souss Massa (CRMEF-SM) for their help in the evaluation, and all of the participants who took part in this study.
• They possess the ability to generate text, create diverse creative content, and provide informative answers to questions, although their accuracy may not always be perfect.
• Among them, ChatGPT and Google Bard are among the most profound AI-powered chatbots.

Making up a quarter of all publications, Efficiency of Education is the second most popular objective (25%), while addressing Students’ Motivation and Availability of Education are third (13%) and fourth (11%), respectively. Other objectives also make up a substantial amount of these publications (19%), although they were too diverse to categorize in a uniform way. Examples of these are inclusivity (Heo and Lee, 2019) or the promotion of student teacher interactions (Mendoza et al., 2020). By grouping the resulting relevant publications according to their date of publication, it is apparent that chatbots in education are currently in a phase of increased attention. The release distribution shows slightly lower publication numbers in the current than in the previous year (Figure 6), which could be attributed to a time lag between the actual publication of manuscripts and their dissemination in databases.

Article Access Statistics

(Winkler and Soellner, 2018) and (Pérez-Marín, 2021), identified research gaps for supporting meta-cognitive skills with chatbots such as self-regulation. This requires a chatbot application that takes a mentoring role, as the development of these meta-cognitive skills can not be achieved solely by information delivery. Within our review we incorporate this by reviewing the mentoring role of chatbots as (Goal 3). Therefore, (Goal 4) of our review lies in the investigation of the adaptation approaches used by chatbots in education.

The related chatbot was implemented and evaluated in Moroccan public schools with the support of teachers from the Regional Center for Education and Training Professions of Souss Massa. One is a control class group that uses a traditional approach, while the other two are experimental groups that employ digital content and the chatbot-based method. Preliminary findings indicate that employing chatbots can greatly enhance student learning experiences by allowing them to study at their own speed with less stress, saving them time, and keeping them motivated.

Real-life examples of customer service chatbots

In other studies, the teaching agent emulates a teacher conducting a formative assessment by evaluating students’ knowledge with multiple-choice questions (Rodrigo et al., 2012; Griol et al., 2014; Mellado-Silva et al., 2020; Wambsganss et al., 2020). A conversational agent can hold a discussion with students in a variety of ways, ranging from spoken (Wik & Hjalmarsson, 2009) to text-based (Chaudhuri et al., 2009) to nonverbal (Wik & Hjalmarsson, 2009; Ruttkay & Pelachaud, 2006). Similarly, the agent’s visual appearance can be human-like or cartoonish, static or animated, two-dimensional or three-dimensional (Dehn & Van Mulken, 2000). Conversational agents have been developed over the last decade to serve a variety of pedagogical roles, such as tutors, coaches, and learning companions (Haake & Gulz, 2009). Furthermore, conversational agents have been used to meet a variety of educational needs such as question-answering (Feng et al., 2006), tutoring (Heffernan & Croteau, 2004; VanLehn et al., 2007), and language learning (Heffernan & Croteau, 2004; VanLehn et al., 2007). Nonetheless, the existing review studies have not concentrated on the chatbot interaction type and style, the principles used to design the chatbots, and the evidence for using chatbots in an educational setting.

The level of the assessment becomes more challenging as the student makes progress. A slightly different interaction is explained in (Winkler et al., 2020), where the chatbot challenges the students with a question. If they answer incorrectly, they are explained why the answer is incorrect and then get asked a scaffolding question. Like all of us, teachers are bound by time and space — but can educational technology offer new ways to make a teacher’s presence and knowledge available to learners?

Stanford d.school’s Leticia Britos Cavagnaro is pioneering efforts to extend interactive resources beyond the classroom. She recently has developed the “d.bot,” which takes a software feature that many of us know through our experiences as customers — the chatbot — and deploys it instead as a tool for teaching and learning. Jenny Robinson, a member of the Stanford Digital Education team, discussed with Britos Cavagnaro what led to her innovation, how it’s working and what she sees as its future. The introduction of Artificial Intelligence technology enables the integration of Chatbot systems into various aspects of education. Chatbot technology has the potential to provide quick and personalised services to everyone in the sector, including institutional employees and students. This paper presents a systematic review of previous studies on the use of Chatbots in education.

The approach authors use often relies on a general knowledge base not tied to a specific field. Most importantly, chatbots played a critical role in the education field, in which most researchers (12 articles; 33.33%) developed chatbots used to teach computer science topics (Fig. 4). 63.88% (23) of the selected articles are conference papers, while 36.11% (13) were published in journals. Interestingly, 38.46% (5) of the journal articles were published recently in 2020. The remaining journal articles were published in several venues such as IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, Journal of Educational Psychology, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent System. Most of these journals are ranked Q1 or Q2 according to Scimago Journal and Country Rank Footnote 7.

The explosion in AI developments over the last year has introduced a third transformative set of factors influencing our Dx efforts and has ushered in the dawn of a new era of digital transformation for higher education. In the coming years, AI tools will power new and deeper transformations of the services that institutions offer, will change how those services are provided, and will affect all areas of the college or university. Campus leaders and IT service providers need to be thinking about those changes now and about the steps that can prepare our institutions for the transformations ahead. GenAI tools are very sensitive to what you tell them to do, or the ‘prompt’ that you enter. Practise writing prompts, and test any prompts you plan to give to students to ensure they work how you want them to. Be aware that a prompt that performs well won’t necessarily perform in the same way later, and that different bots will respond differently to the same prompt.

AI chatbots provide time-saving assistance by handling routine administrative tasks such as scheduling, grading, and providing information to students, allowing educators to focus more on instructional planning and student engagement. Educators can improve their pedagogy by leveraging AI chatbots to augment their instruction and offer personalized support to students. By customizing educational content and generating prompts for open-ended questions aligned with specific learning objectives, teachers can cater to individual student needs and enhance the learning experience. Additionally, educators can use AI chatbots to create tailored learning materials and activities to accommodate students’ unique interests and learning styles. As technology continues to advance, AI-powered educational chatbots are expected to become more sophisticated, providing accurate information and offering even more individualized and engaging learning experiences. They are anticipated to engage with humans using voice recognition, comprehend human emotions, and navigate social interactions.

On the flip side, Zendesk’s lack of a free plan may deter smaller businesses, and its requirement for a minimum of five seats per plan suggests it’s better suited for larger teams. Additionally, its advanced features come with a steep learning curve, potentially necessitating extra training. Best practices, code samples, and inspiration to build communications and digital engagement experiences. Think of a proactive chatbot as a helpful in-store employee or a virtual assistant.

Chatbots’ ease of use and ability to rapidly create human-like text, including everything from reports, essays, and recipes to computer code, ensure that the AI revolution will be a powerful tool for students at every level to improve their capabilities and expertise. But, like most powerful technologies, the use of chatbots offers challenges as well as opportunities. For these and other geopolitical reasons, ChatGPT is banned in countries with strict internet censorship policies, like North Korea, Iran, Syria, Russia, and China. Several nations prohibited the usage of the application due to privacy apprehensions. Meanwhile, North Korea, China, and Russia, in particular, contended that the U.S. might employ ChatGPT for disseminating misinformation. Conversely, OpenAI restricts access to ChatGPT in certain countries, such as Afghanistan and Iran, citing geopolitical constraints, legal considerations, data protection regulations, and internet accessibility as the basis for this decision.

The results show that the chatbots were proposed in various areas, including mainly computer science, language, general education, and a few other fields such as engineering and mathematics. Most chatbots are accessible via a web platform, and a fewer chatbots were available on mobile and desktop platforms. This choice can be explained by the flexibility the web platform benefits of chatbots in education offers as it potentially supports multiple devices, including laptops, mobile phones, etc. As an example of an evaluation study, the researchers in (Ruan et al., 2019) assessed students’ reactions and behavior while using ‘BookBuddy,’ a chatbot that helps students read books. The researchers recorded the facial expressions of the participants using webcams.

At the time of its release, ChatGPT was the first widely available chatbot capable of generating text indistinguishable, in some cases, from human-generated text (Gao et al., 2022). Due to this novel ability, ChatGPT garnered more than 120 million users within the first two months of release, becoming the fastest-growing software application of all time (Milmo, 2023). Conversely, Garcia Brustenga et al. (2018) categorized ECs based on eight tasks in the educational context as described in Table 1. Correspondingly, these tasks reflect that ECs may be potentially beneficial in fulfilling the three learning domains by providing a platform for information retrieval, emotional and motivational support, and skills development. As data sources, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academics, and the educational research database “Fachportal Pädagogik” (including ERIC) were selected, all of which incorporate all major publishers and journals.

• This user-friendly option provides convenient and efficient access to information, enhancing the overall student experience and streamlining administrative processes.
• The information you collect can help determine whether the customer should purchase through self-service or your sales team, and it can identify which agent should hop into the conversation.
• To delineate and map the field of chatbots in education, initial findings were collected by a preliminary literature search.
• An example of this is the chatbot in (Sandoval, 2018) that answers general questions about a course, such as an exam date or office hours.

Since then, AI technology has significantly advanced and chatbots are now able to provide more comprehensive language learning support, such as conversational exchange, interactive activities, and multimedia content (Jung, 2019; Li et al., 2022). This paper will help to better understand how educational chatbots can be effectively utilized to enhance education and address the specific needs and challenges of students and educators. Chatbots can provide students with immediate feedback, assisting the metacognitive processes of learning (Chang et al., 2022; Cunningham-Nelson et al., 2019; Guo et al., 2022; Okonkwo & Ade-Ibijola, 2021; Wollny et al., 2021). Similar feedback functions are incorporated on a smaller scale into software applications such as Grammarly, Microsoft Word, and Google Docs.