Chatbots as a Tool to Scale Mentoring Processes: Individually Supporting Self-Study in Higher Education.

Area of Science:

• Educational Sciences
• Humanities and Social Sciences
• Digital Learning Technologies

Background:

• Pre-service teacher training in educational sciences involves extensive reading and writing, necessitating timely, high-quality feedback.
• Traditional one-to-one mentoring, while effective, faces scalability challenges due to limited university resources.
• There is a need for scalable technological solutions to support student learning and feedback processes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate methods for making personal mentoring accessible to a wider student audience.
• To explore the integration of didactic, organizational, and technical frameworks in university settings.
• To develop and implement chatbots for supporting self-study in educational sciences.

Main Methods:

• An interdisciplinary approach was employed to address the challenges of scaling mentoring.
• Two chatbots were developed and implemented to assist students with seminar topics and literature.
• The chatbots were deployed and utilized by over 700 students within a one-year period.

Main Results:

• The developed chatbots demonstrated promising results in supporting student self-study.
• The evaluations indicated a potential for improved availability of digital mentoring.
• The study successfully integrated chatbots into the educational sciences curriculum.

Conclusions:

• Chatbots offer a viable solution for scaling personalized feedback and mentoring in higher education.
• Digital mentoring support can be effectively enhanced through the implementation of well-designed technological tools.
• Further development and implementation of such technologies can benefit a broader range of students in educational sciences.