Category Archives: News & Blogs

Date: 14th January 2021
Post Type: Blog

Chatbots are programs that act as an additional communication channel between an organisation and its audience. If the audience has a question, Chatbots will automatically and instantly respond without human intervention. The technology is based on AI, natural language processing, and text analysis.

This technology is a boon for universities around the world. It can help with counseling, answering queries, and delivering helpful information to students and their parents or guardians. No longer do students need to wait days before an email is answered or a request is handled.

However, chatbots go much further than this. –  they are the outriders towards an intelligent student information system that supplies answers to any question a student may ask, 24/24, and 7/7.

The technology hasn’t made its way to the majority of universities yet, but it is slowly catching on. Education Technology firm Ellucian took a survey in which 52% of recruiters and 58% of students said they trust digital credentials.  And, of course, there’s no safer credentialing than with Blockchain.

Are Universities Using Chatbots?

According to Mark McNasby, CEO of Ivy.ai, chatbots were initially used to cover specific areas like financial aid or IT. However, institutions are now expanding their use for much broader functions.

Today, 35-40% of questions asked by students to different departmental chatbots relate to other departments. For example, a college admissions chatbot may be asked about the career options of a specific field. That’s the domain of the placements and careers department.

To solve this, companies have started to develop university-wide chatbots AdmitHub is an example and their chatbot now covers  6,500 discrete topics.

At the moment, chatbot use is still low, but the results have been very promising. Institutions like Herriot-Watt University, George Washington University, and Chung-Ang University have begun experimenting with AI chatbots to assess an application, student reaction, and effectiveness.

Chatbots Allow for Better Communication

Chatbots have already shown promise for better communication with students. At George Washington University, the MARTHA bot generated 4,500 conversations in a month. The bot was shown to improve its functionality as conversations increased.  

At the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Interactive Computing, a chatbot called Jill Watson was introduced by Professor Ashok Goel. His students didn’t know that she wasn’t a human being till the end of the course. That speaks to how seamless and effortless communication with a chatbot can be.

At Chung-Ang University, students benefitted from a new chatbot introduced in 2020. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it provided guidelines for online class attendance and safety around campus. Plans are now being made to add support for more languages and providing more information.

Not only do chatbots encourage communication due to this seamlessness, but they also generate more conversations. With an increase in communication, students can develop better relationships with their university, and of course, get answers more quickly.

Chatbots Improve Student Retention

According to the National Student Clearinghouse, only 61.7% of all US students continue at the same college they enter originally. In Germany, 28% of students give up their studies at the institute they began in the first year. However, the introduction of chatbots has yielded some improvement in these figures.

Take, for example, Bethel University. It’s a small liberal arts college in Mishawaka, Indiana. For three years, first to second-year retention was on the decline. When they tried Wilhelm, a chatbot AI, their retention rate went up by 4%. Also, 85% of the students that used the chatbot gave it favourable ratings.

Chatbots can Handle Student Counselling for Academia and Campus Life

Not only are chatbots are a great way to engage with students for academia, but for campus life as well.

At Georgia State University, chatbots were successfully utilised to reduce ‘summer melt’(lost students), guiding students that were unsure about which courses to take to select their subjects. It also helped students process financial aid applications and placement exams. This resulted in a 22% reduction in summer melt and 324 more students attended class on the first day.

Chatbots have also been shown to help students with mental health issues. An experimental study was carried out with Chatbots in the University of Tsukuba. The study compared the effects of a chatbot course with a self-guided mental health course. Participants at the university exhibited lower stress levels with the chatbot programme.

Conclusion

Chatbots, though still limited in their use by universities globally are gaining a greater market share as the convenience and cost-savings slowly become apparent. And there is anecdotal evidence that COVID 19 restrictions are accelerating this take-up, for students, faculty, and parents. And they can do this across the entire student journey from admission through to certification.

Contact us to find out more and if you have a few minutes please click here to answer a brief survey.

Date: 16th December 2020
Post Type: Blog

Blockchain has been hailed as the best tamper-proof technology in the world. There is no known way to fool it. The decentralized ledger system is being experimented with around the world in many sectors, including Education.

For example, the Central New Mexico Community College provides new graduates with a diploma that is authenticated and recorded on a Blockchain., reducing fraud, improving validation responsiveness, and reducing costs.

The technology hasn’t made its way to the majority of universities yet, but it is slowly catching on. Education Technology firm Ellucian took a survey in which 52% of recruiters and 58% of students said they trust digital credentials.  And, of course, there’s no safer credentialing than with Blockchain.

So here are just a few ways that Blockchain can help universities around the world. 

Blockchain Credentials 

In 2018, the University of Basel in Switzerland issued certificates with Blockchain. They were registered on the Ethereum Blockchain. The technology comprised two parts; the first component would create the certificate and register it to the Blockchain with a unique hash identifier. The second component was a public tool for anyone (student, recruiter etc.) to use to verify the certificate. 

Muroran Institute of Technology in Hokkaido Japan did something similar. They have piloted a Blockchain initiative to authenticate their students’ academic records. The project was scheduled to begin in March 2020. Five other Japanese universities are set to follow suit.  

Another example of this technology came in 2019, when 9 of the world’s top universities gathered together for academic credentialing. The challenge was issued by MIT vice president Sanjay Sarma. He highlighted that students would always have to look to their university for credential verification. As a result, employment, placement, and admission processes would be held up.  

To answer this challenge, UC Berkeley, MIT, Delft University in the Netherlands, Hasso Plattner in Germany, and several others came together. They’ve vowed to develop a free service through which students can store and share their academic credentials through Blockchain.   

The initiative has caught on in India as well, at the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University Hyderabad. The university has deployed Blockchain in its academic credentialing system as a response to forgeries. Students were applying for visas using fake certificates in the state of Telangana.  

Blockchain Student Records  

For universities Blockchain can be more than just a way to improve how credentials are provided. For example, the University of Nicosia in Cyprus is using Blockchain to record students’ achievements and is proving very popular. The same is being done at the Holberton School of Software Engineering in San Francisco. The school announced that it would share academic certificates through Blockchain from 2017 onwards.  

ECPI University in Virginia has done the same thing. They’ve partnered with a Blockchain digital credentials start-up and had uploaded over 1000 diplomas as of August 2018. This has allowed students to share digital certificates with employers and recruiters without the need for them to send the certificates through mail.  

Examinations 

At least one major country has made use of Blockchain to make examinations tamper-proof. In 2019, the Russian Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Education and Science announced that they would use blockchain technology for the graduation exams. They would use it to ensure quality control for the Unified State Exam in the country.   

In Conclusion 

It’s still early days for Blockchain use in Education but as summarized above, the potential is clear right across the student lifecycle – from admissions to assessment and certification to student records. Legacy investments in integrated Student Information Systems (SIS) are not the barrier they may seem as Blockchain can naturally play a role of bridging the information gap between students and the institution, their potential employers and the many other untrusted parties in the student eco-system such as banks, accommodation providers and public authorities.  

If you’re looking for a partner to explore how blockchain could be put to use today to increase trust, create value and differentiate your institution then contact us. 

If you have 2 minutes, please help us better understand the state of Blockchain in your institution and country by answering these questions. Please click here to fill out the survey.