Chatbot as tutor ‘can help students achieve learning goals’
Since the introduction of ChatGPT, the tool has become immensely popular with students. The Faculty of Humanities is now developing its own bots that can act for students as an individual tutor. In January, product owner Julian van der Kraats assists at a workshop on this technique to interested Humanities teachers.
‘In practice, we see students using bots like ChatGPT as a kind of tutor,’ says Van der Kraats. ‘They brainstorm with it, do source research or improve the structure of a paper, but also have the option to let such a bot do their work for them.’
Helping, not providing answers
Like many other educational institutions, the Faculty of Humanities therefore prefers to take matters into its own hands. ‘If we offer a bot ourselves, we can also write the system prompt, or the bot’s background task ,’ Van der Kraats explains. ‘In this way, you can make sure the bot doesn’t do the homework, but triggers students in question-and-answer form, for example, to arrive at the correct answer.’
Reducing workload
Meanwhile, the Faculty has partnered with SURF and Npuls to create such bots. An initial training session for interested lecturers to programme their own bot will follow in January. ‘A well-programmed bot answers students’ questions 24/7. That can reduce the workload by a lot,' says Van der Kraats.
Moreover, setting up a bot costs relatively little effort. ‘Large language models are trained on so much data that they actually already know a lot about the course,’ says Van der Kraats. 'As an instructor, you just need to upload the specific information about the course, after which the ISSC can help formulate the right system prompt. The question is what do students need to learn and how can the bot help with that?'
Educate
What remains then is to explain to students why it is more beneficial to use the university's bot. ‘Of course, they can still have ChatGPT do their work, but at the end of the day, they are here to learn something,’ says Van der Kraats. ‘You can best simply tell them that these bots will help them do that better.’
On Npuls' and SURF’s new experimental EduGenAI platform, you can configure chatbots yourself. By adding background data, such as course material, these bots can, for example, act as tutors and help your students study the course material. If you are curious about the possibilities of this AI platform, we would like to invite you to the lunch byte on 16 January from 12.15-13.45.