I see chatbots playing a huge role in the clerical realm (communications) of education. Clerical staff at schools are inundated with daily phone calls and email messages that often are simple requests or questions -- many as simple as: "yes, today is a day 4 of the schedule or "no, today is not an early dismissal day" or, "yes the sr. boys basketball team plays at 5pm" etc. Such simple questions surely can be answered by a chatbot!? I looked into this to see if schools were starting to employ the use of chatbots. I stumbled across this article: https://blog.admithub.com/admithub-launches-first-college-chatbot-with-georgia-state which I highly recommend looking it. In short it highlights Georgia State University's roll out a chatbot in 2016. In its first month of operation, the chatbot (called Pounce) answered over 50,000 questions with a 99% success rate, meaning only 1% of the questions needed to be forwarded to a human.
I can't even imagine liberation this would provide for clerical and other school officials. Even in my role as a classroom teacher, chatbots would be useful. Everyday students ask questions various and never ending questions (what class do I have first period, when is the assembly, what is the block rotation, what is my internet password etc etc etc). Based on the Georgia State example, a chatbot could answer many of these questions with a high degree of efficiency and thus free time for eduction staff to focus on more complicated tasks that require human labour.
Taken one step further, I see chatbots as having the potential to reach out to students and parents to inform them of upcoming events, warn of poor attendance / truancy behaviours, remind students of upcoming exams, share daily school related information / news all via text. This constant communication could help to foster increased connection to school. Deacon's Genie is a next gen example of smart conversational chatbot as described above. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsRPuU53E74
Thank you, Team Bot for such a creative OER. It was very informative and inspiring to see how else Bots could be useful in administration. The Deakin Genie referenced by Dustin is more than a clerical chatbot and instead seems almost mother-like, nagging a student to get a task done or to watch a class. While a personal assistant is really useful in pulling a student's academic life together, it could lead to a kind of dumbing down where the student no longer has to make the effort to organise his calendar, gather his own study materials, or figure out how to break down an assignment into bite sizes. The Genie could then become too intelligent and in turn make the student stupid and lazy.