Chat-bots for Student Enquiries: Are we communicating to university students in the way they want?

And more importantly are we saying to them what they need to hear?

A Personal Journey of Learning how to talk to Millennials

I'm not that old. Or at least I don't think I am! :) But I have to admit that I've gone through my own journey of discovery when it comes to talking to Millennials (i.e. the young 18 to 22 year olds that populate our Universities these days).

Flash back to several years ago. I'm at a Christmas party at a friend's place. I'm chatting with my friend whom own's the house upstairs with all the "adults". I ask "Where are all the younger folks?". He says that they are all downstairs. I remark at how quite it is downstairs. Maybe we should go take a look and make sure nothing "bad" is going on? :) We walk down to his basement to find about 20+ teenagers all sitting in a circle, none of them talking, all looking at and busily typing on their phones. I was a bit gobsmacked. They were all chatting to each other. It was just over their phones. First lesson for me learnt. That given the options of talking or chatting on their phone through Snap-chat, Instagram, etc. (Facebook is so old school now! :)) these Millenials often prefer to be be on their phones. "Humph" I say, "What is the world coming to?".

Flash forward a few years but still a few years back from now. I'm teaching my first university lecture. I'm all excited. I had spent days working on my presentation deck for the lecture. I get in there, start to talk and realise that about 1/3rd of the students are on their phones again. Disgruntled I make a point of calling a few of them out for not paying attention. After a few lectures of this I clue in. I couldn't "make" them pay attention. What I needed to do is communicate to them in a way they wanted to be communicated with. Flash forward even further, you'll still find me presenting content at the front of the class but every class I now use mobile tools like https://www.quitch.com/education/, https://www.socrative.com/ and https://padlet.com to push out content to the students, both inside and outside of the class, check their understanding of the content and to get them to collaborate together with me and with each other.

Moving close to the current time. This last semester I learnt something further. I was teaching a class that had a lot of content. As there were no lectures only workshops I needed a way of getting students to review the content before coming to class. I came up with the ingenious (or at least I thought so) idea of getting them to complete a quiz every week. The quiz would be online, open from Tuesday the week of the class to 9:00am on the Friday morning as the class started. I anticipated that the keen students would get the readings and quiz done early in the week. The less keen students would do it the night before. Do you know when 90% of the students completed the quiz?... between 11:00pm the night before and 8:00am the morning of the class. Conclusion, I might have been a night owl when I was an undergrad but I've got nothing on these students. Most of their cognitive capabilities are deployed late into the evenings and they leave most things to the last minute.

Overall conclusion: Millenials whom swim through the technologies of Snap-chat and Instagram (and lots of other online social sites that we have never heard of), prefer to communicate via chat , prefer a 24/7 communication time frame and have become used to almost instantaneous feedback to any queries they have.

Enter the new way of communicating to students: The AI Driven Chat-bot

We should all be familiar with the concept of Chat. Skype, Facebook, Messenger and Snap-Chat that we all use everyday are all examples of basic Chat. But what is a Chat-bot? Chat-bots are Artificial Intelligence (AI) based entities that use chat to respond to simple queries from people. Chat-bots can communicate over a variety of different channels including email, voice (including phone) and simple text chat. Text chat can include pop up windows on your website but also utilise channels such as Skype, Facebook, Snap-Chat, We-Chat and others. Chat-bots can also initiate conversations over the various channels based on certain criteria. Microsoft's Cortana, the Google Home and the Amazon Echo Dot are all examples of chat-bots.

Recognising this new way of automated communication, many universities are quickly adopting the use of Chat and the AI driven Chat-bot or Digital Assistant to communicate to their students for a variety of applications that you may be surprised about...

• University of Adelaide uses Chat-bots to help their students figure out ATAR Scores;

• Deakins University recently released a Chat-bot called "Genie" to help students with their all their enquiries;

• Technical University in Berlin provides "Alex" the Chat-bot to students to find courses and to build their class schedules; and

• Georgia Tech uses virtual teaching assistants (Chat-bots) to supplement actual TAs for their larger classes.

The list of universities using AI Driven Chatbots in both the USA and here in Australia is growing rapidly for a variety of applications not just for initial student enquires, but all the way through the student life cycle from recruitment to admissions to ongoing engagement.

And the conclusion from their early deployments is that students love them!

Instead of waiting on the phone for 20 minutes during regular office hours to then wait 5 or 10 more minutes where the bored call centre person first authenticates the student and then sifts through their systems to find the relevant information, these student can pop online 24/7 and get at least their basic queries answered in a few minutes. Event more interesting these Chat-bots can be deployed to engage the students proactively, for example when they are perceived of being at risk of dropping out. The Chat-bot starts the conversation and engages the student much faster than a human would!

Why now with Artificial Intelligence and the AI Chat-bot?

Artificial Intelligence has been around for a number of years as has the concept of Chat based AI. But it has increased in popularity in the last few years. So much so that Gartner (2017) now boldly stating that "By 2020, 85% of CIOs will be piloting AI programs". But why the recent popularity? Well there are a few reasons....

First, we have reached a tipping point in the amount of available data. AI and the AI driven Chat-bot is heavily reliant on the volume, velocity and variety of available digital data. As each of these factors increases the better the AI Chat-bot or Digital Assistant gets at answering questions. With the advent of the Internet and now the Internet of Things the amount available data is growing exponentially.

Second, with the advent of cloud computing the availability of large amounts of low cost computing make AI more affordable. AI traditionally requires a large amount of computing power over a short period of time to train the mathematical models used in the AI bots. Once trained the AI can then be deployed to relatively low cost ongoing compute. Now with cloud computing offering the ability to purchase extremely large amounts of computing power, cost effectively for a short periods of time, high quality AI driven chat becomes more practical.

The third reason for AI's recent surge into the limelight, and the popularity of the AI driven chatbots is the advent of better tools to deliver these bots. Recently improvements mean AI is getting more accurate in it's approximation of reality. Answers from bots are more human like and AI models more robust at handling a variety of questions. You can even give the bot a personality making it very straight laced or perhaps just a little bit cheeky.

Finally, the tools available to programmers to create Chat-bots and Digital Assistants have evolved to the point where building and delivering a bot can be done in days. I was having a play last week using the AI tools from a well known software vendor and was able to get a bot built and deploy it in a few hours. Now it was a relatively simple Bot that I built, but my point is that these tools and techniques now make it practical for most IT departments to build and maintain bots with fairly complex back end integrations to source student management systems themselves. If I can do it they can do it too! :)

But isn't an AI Driven Chatbot hard to deploy?

Not really. Most Chat-bot projects take 4 to 6 weeks to deploy and are so low cost that Universities are deploying them out of their existing opex. As I said, the tools and the AIs backing the tools have advanced to the point where a typical bot deployment can be done extremely quickly. There are some issues that may impact the speed and cost of deployment. These include the level of back end integration, the number of languages you want to deploy them in (Simplified Chinese being popular given the large number of overseas students in Australia) and the number of channels you want to deploy the bot across (website, Facebook, Snap-Chat, WeChat, etc.). But these are still relatively quick and easy projects (by University IT standards) to get up and running.

Conclusions...

AI Driven Chat-bots will become an increasing way that universities will manage the large volumes of student enquiries and to provide proactive touch points for the students. These Chat-bots will not only improve the service level perceptions of the students because they can communicate quickly in a way they want at a time they want, but it will also make university operations staff happier too. Because, instead of spending most of their time answer large volumes of standard questions from students they can now spend their time focusing on the more complex student issues giving the students the service they deserve.