Building Chatbots for Learning and Training

#computing #Online #Education #Chatbot #conversational #AI

2025 Spring IEEE OKC Webinar Series

IEEE OKC invites you to join the event below, organized by Oklahoma International Publishing, as part of its 2025 Spring OkIP Conferences on Wednesday, April 2, 2025.

This virtual event is free of charge to IEEE Oklahoma City members. Please register ahead of time to receive the proper instructions for remote participation:

>> Speaker:
Dr. Maiga Chang
Full Professor
Associate Dean, Research & Innovation
Faculty of Science and Technology
Athabasca University, Canada

>> Talk:
Building Chatbot for Learning and Training

>>> Abstract:

Online learning and teaching do not mean that putting course materials online and asking students to learn by themselves. It is important to provide students supports when they encounter questions about course content or materials. When students ask their question on a discussion forum in an online learning environment, sometimes there may have no one available at that time to help them due to time differences or study behaviors and needs – for instances some students may have family/children/baby and day job and they might not be able to do their study until late night or weekends. This leads to an obvious conclusion that if a system was in place to provide an automated summary, this could facilitate learning. Having an easily accessible system, which can quickly provide responses, allows students to get information that may have otherwise been difficult to find.  In this talk, I will explain how chatbots can be developed and discuss three potential chatbot in education applications: (1) the Ask4Summary Moodle plugin (https://ask4summary.vipresearch.ca/#download) acts like an online tutor can automatically answers a student’s question with a summary assembled via matching and retrieving from the stored information; (2) a block-based, visual editing environment to alleviate the burden of knowledge imposed on users wishing to implement chatbots in their use of training and/or as an automated first-level of support; and (3) guardians living in MEGA World (https://megaworld.game-server.ca/), who provide individual students a way to get their questions explained and the information asked.

>>> About the speaker:

Dr. Maiga Chang is Associate Dean, Research & Innovation, and Full Professor at Faculty of Science and Technology, Athabasca University, Canada. He is also Honorary Chair Professor at Multidisciplinary Academic Research Center, National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan. Dr. Chang is IEEE Senior Member and has been appointed as an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor for 2023 to 2025. He is also received Distinguished Researcher Award from Asia Pacific Society on Computers in Education (APSCE) in 2022.
Dr. Chang is now Vice President (2022~) of International Association of Smart Learning Environments (IASLE) and editors-in-chief (2019~) of Journal of Educational Technology & Society (Open Access SSCI in Quartile Q1 with rank 22/756 in Education & Educational Research category by Journal Impact Factor 4.595), editor-in-chief (2014~) of International Journal of Distance Education Technologies (Open Access ESCI in Quartile Q1 with rank 64/756 in Education & Educational Research category by Journal Impact Factor 3.3, SCOPUS, EI), and editor-in-chief (2020~) of Bulletin of Technical Committee on Learning Technology (Open Access ESCI).
He is also an Executive Committee member of Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education (2017~2028, APSCE) and Global Chinese Society for Computing in Education (2016~2025, GCSCE),  and Chair (2021~) of Educational Activities Committee, IEEE Northern Canada Section. Dr. Chang is helping as a Steering Committee member (2020~) for International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS).
Dr. Chang has given more than 160 talks and lectures in different events; He also has (co-)authored more than 260 book chapters, journal and international conference papers. He is an IEEE member since 1996 and also a member of ACM (2001-2017), AAAI (since 2001-2017), INNS (2004-2018), and Phi Tau Phi Scholastic Honor Society.
His current research mainly focus on artificial intelligence; natural language processing; learning behaviour analysis; learning analytics and academic analytics; game-based learning, training and assessment; intelligent agent technology; educational data mining; computational intelligence; health informatics and healthcare technology, etc.

08:55am - 09:00am Virtual Meeting  Speaker Introduction

09:00am - 09:45am Virtual Meeting Keynote

09:45pm - 10:00am Virtual Meeting Q &A

PDH for one hour will be provided on request.