Research line: Innovation in Education
Phd research
Researcher: Tim Debets
Start 2022

Contact: prof. dr. Desirée Joosten-ten Brinke

Students in higher education spend the majority of their time on self-study. After instruction, the quality of students’ self-study activities largely determines their learning outcomes and academic performance. There is ample evidence that students use suboptimal self-study strategies and that it is difficult for them to assess their own strategies’ quality3. Examples of training programs and tutorials in effective self-study4 do exist, but they are not task-specific, not personalized, limited in time and require a large teaching load.

Educational chatbots

We believe the solution for this problem lies in educational chatbots. This project will develop an educational chatbot that provides instant, personalized and context-specific study advice to students in all educational programs at the OU. A pilot chatbot is currently under development at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, but this chatbot features fixed, pre-structured advice methods in one limited setting. This project investigates how a much more general, adaptive chatbot can be obtained for experimental investigation with automated advice strategies on effective learning. 

Team

Faculty of Educational Sciences: prof. dr. Desirée Joosten-ten Brinke (promotor), dr. Gino Camp (copromotor).
Faculty of Science: prof. dr. Tanja Vos (promotor), dr. ir. Martijn van Otterlo (copromotor).