Ai-Powered Chatbots: Functional 4-Year Degree Plans

 Over the past year, the Academic Innovation + Intelligence Lab has developed, trained, and piloted a set of AI-enabled chatbots to support students as they navigate their paths through the University.

UBot is a virtual tutor that guides students to answers rather than providing them directly. Utilizing large language models and trained in specific curriculum and course material, UBot assists students outside of traditional tutoring and mentoring windows, with much of the activity occurring before tests from 10 pm - 2 am. UBot was specially trained, developed, and piloted in large gateway classes as part of the Academic Recovery Project. It will be released to an ever-increasing number of courses to support student success.

UGuide is a virtual docent that helps students explore majors in a simple, personalized way. It aggregates disparate data sources across the institution into one approachable chat interface. It allows students to investigate majors from multiple angles based on their priorities (e.g., career paths, schedules) and provides continuous prompts based on what other students have asked to encourage engagement. UGuide is in the early stages of development and will soon be piloted and tested in upcoming semesters.

Always available, infinitely patient, and multilingual, these bots and others in development are working to close gaps in student success by providing targeted, highly personalized responses in an accessible, deployable, and scalable way.

 

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