Course Chatbot: Unlocking Learning Anytime, Anywhere
Besides our website, we are co-creating AI-driven applications with exceptionally gifted students. Together, we’re adding value to education through AI. While mainstream AI tools are great, we believe that customized solutions for education can provide even more benefits.
This summer, we worked hard on our biggest project so far: the course chatbots! Currently, we are testing these chatbots in 7 different courses at Tilburg University. Our long-term goal? To make them available for everyone at the university!
In one sentence, our chatbot allows students to interact with their course material and not only provides answers but also links to the sources where the information is found.
What does our chatbot do?
The chatbot helps students by answering questions related to lecture materials and provides relevant resources, such as PDFs and slides.
Why did we develop this?
- We want to make AI tools available to everyone, not just students who can afford expensive subscriptions.
- We aim to educate students and research how they interact with such tools.
- Personally, we have gained many more skills since the launch of ChatGPT, as we can ask questions and brainstorm 24/7. We want to offer students the same opportunity to dive deeper into their courses at any time without being stuck because they can’t ask their teacher at that moment. Think of our chatbot as your virtual teaching assistant that’s always there!
How does it work?
The chatbot is built on the RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) framework. When a student asks a question, it’s transformed into an “embedding” (a mathematical representation of the text), which is matched with embeddings from course documents. The system then uses the most relevant sections to generate a response, assisted by a large language model. The chatbot always cites its sources, allowing students to explore the material in greater depth. We will dive deeper into the technical aspects of our chatbots in upcoming articles and podcasts!
Who is it for?
This chatbot is designed for students at Tilburg University, but we’re excited to share our knowledge with other universities and educational institutions. Want to create a course chatbot for your own course? Contact [email protected]!
Example Course Chatbots:
Online Data Collection and Management Chatbot
Learn How to Mine the Web
The oCDM Chatbot is about the Online Data Collection and Management course!
This chatbot helps you with essential skills for gathering web data. You’ll learn the technical aspects of web scraping and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and how to design your data collection for use in empirical research projects, especially in marketing.
Use this chatbot here.