Digital Learning Assistant
For this Bachelor Thesis, a prototype of a digital learning assistant, also called chatbot, was developed. The chatbot is able to connect to Moodle as a backend and provides a wide range of features for both students and teachers.
Schori, Dominic, 2020
Art der Arbeit Bachelor Thesis
Auftraggebende FHNW School of Business
Betreuende Dozierende Martin, Andreas
Keywords Digital, Learning, Assistant, Chatbot, Moodle
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The starting point of this Bachelor Thesis is a previous thesis done by Rahel Le in 2018. Le conducted a feasibility study on the topic of chatbot usability at the FHNW and developed a prototype of such a chatbot designed to assist students with answering frequently asked questions. In a next step, the chatbot should be further developed to connect to Moodle as a backend system, to enable the chatbot to incorporate learning materials from Moodle. This connection should be done using web services, where a messenger connects via webhook to the Moodle backend database.
To develop a chatbot that is able to access to Moodle as a backend system, first a local instance of Moodle was installed. This local instance was filled with a few example courses and files to fulfil the use cases of the prototype. A middleware, developed in Python and named Smart Hub, was created to manage the API calls to the REST API of Moodle, the integration into the Messenger Microsoft Teams using incoming- and outgoing webhooks as well as the connection to the Dialogflow agent.
The result of this bachelor’s thesis is a working prototype of a chatbot that is integrated into Microsoft Teams as a frontend messenger service and able to connect to Moodle through API calls. All connections are managed in a middleware, developed in Python and named Smart Hub. The chatbot is able to fulfil queries for students such as providing information on a certain course, listing all enrolled and ongoing courses, showing current assignments for a certain course, deliver links to all files of a course and accessing information from a third party source in a Google Sheet containing information on summer schools. Further, the chatbot has a functionality that shows the potential of artificial intelligence in combination with such a chatbot, where the chatbot is able to summarize a large text sent by the user. Besides functionalities for students, the teachers have the ability to receive a notification from the Smart Hub once certain actions trigger in courses taught by them, such as a new forum entry or the upload of an assignment.
This prototype serves as a great foundation for future plans to implement such a digital learning assistant for the students of the FHNW.
Studiengang: Business Information Technology (Bachelor)
Vertraulichkeit: öffentlich