A Blueprint for Integrating Task-Oriented Conversational Agents in Education

Abstract

Over the past few years, there has been an increase in the use of chatbots for educational purposes. Nevertheless, the chatbot technologies and architectures that are often applied to educational contexts are not necessarily designed for such contexts. While general-purpose chatbot technologies can be used in educational contexts, there are some challenges specific to these contexts that need to be taken into consideration. Namely, chatbot technologies intended for education should, by design, integrate directly within online learning applications and focus on achieving learning goals by supporting learners with the task at hand. In this paper, we propose a blueprint for an architecture specifically aimed at integrating task-oriented chatbots to support learners in educational contexts. We then present a proof-of-concept implementation of our blueprint as a part of a code review application designed to teach programming best practices. Our blueprint could serve as a starting point for developers in education looking to build chatbot technologies targeting educational contexts and is a first step toward an open chatbot architecture explicitly tailored for learning applications.