Education Embraces SnatchBot Intelligent Chatbots Solution

Twenty years ago, students were spending their free time by exchanging dorm gossip, grunge cassettes, and hard copies of Hornby’s Fever Pitch. How the times have changed. Come digital age, these signature signs of what was once a college life have become fully obsolete. It’s all smartphones and Instagram with Gen Z’s, making a student connected but hyped-up, resourceful but desensitized.

At least that’s how the world sees them.

In reality, a modern student is a bearer of radical change, ever curious and eager to learn. The apple didn’t fall too far from the tree – the only difference is, we’re having a harder time picking it up. While everything’s spinning at a faster speed, it’s only our education system that’s moving at a trotting pace.

If our students are indeed hyped-up and desensitized, could it be so because we’re failing them?
Let’s listen to what tech-savvy educators have to say about that.

When SnatchBot’s team asked Gaurav Tekriwal, a math teacher from India, about the advice he might want to offer to fellow educationalists, he said: “Teaching is an amazing thing. We just need to explore new ways to teach and your students will love and thank you for it. You can make learning fun for everybody using technology. Go for it with all your passion”. It’s still a heartfelt and prudent advice.

As a company that currently offers the best free chatbots on the market, SnatchBot is proactively working on raising tech awareness throughout the education industry. Gaurav Tekriwal’s success story speaks of one of the first use cases for their virtual assistants in this sector, namely in teaching math.

Frustrated with math phobia, Tekriwal was looking for a solution that would compensate for the scarcity of teachers, poor quality of lesson delivery in the classroom, and expensive tutoring options. In his opinion, these are the main culprits for today’s disengagement from the traditional teaching mode.

In chatbots, he discovered a whole new way of teaching math:

“The Math chatbot takes care of problems at scale. The quality of lesson delivery is great and standardized. The bot is affordable and doesn’t cost a bomb to use it and it’s very personalized. With these benefits, I think that the bot will start to cause a massive disruption in the years to come causing a paradigm shift in the way everyone learns Mathematics”. Tekriwal’s plan is to launch 200 new bots.

Of course, and not only because chatbots are the latest word of technology.
Let’s see how they perform in three crucial aspects of teaching – motivation, delivery, and assessment.

*-Student Motivation
*Educational institutions are famously cautious when it comes to adopting any kind of tech, but even they cannot argue with chatbots being a great motivational tool. And, that’s only the first benefit of welcoming one to the modern-day classroom – digitally native students are simply more comfortable using digitally-native solutions. In comparison to textbooks, chatbots excel in encouraging interaction.

*-Lesson Delivery
*When it comes to teaching methods and lesson deliveries, personalization is the decisive factor that contributes to both the student’s willingness to learn and his or her ability to acquire and use new knowledge. It requires teachers to successfully delegate their time, keep track of individual students’ performance, and custom-tailor the learning path to intellectual abilities and interests of each student.

Bots can do all this thanks to AI, NLP and machine learning.

Together, these three capabilities allow them to learn at each interaction – to collect data about the user and use that data in order to personalize answers during the next conversation. When a student has questions about a lesson or concept he or she doesn’t understand, the bot doesn’t only provide accurate answers; it also shifts the approach and explains it in a way that the student can understand.

*-Student Assessment
*With some creativity, teachers could entirely delegate tests and quizzes to chatbots. Until this tech-reliant assessment practice takes off, chatbots can be used to answer frequently asked questions about deadlines, curriculums, and learning resources, but also to help teachers collect student information and streamline the evaluation process, or stay up to date with new assessment models.

Let’s not forget that motivation to learn is a fickle thing, especially during the pre-college years. Teachers need every trick in the book in order to gain and maintain the interest of their students, and how better to approach them than on their own terrain, using technology that they themselves use?

Maybe you haven’t noticed, but single-utility apps and websites are going obsolete too.
Multipurpose platforms like Facebook are taking the lead, simultaneously acting as communication channels and sources of last-minute content. Everything we could need can be found there without switching tabs.

Chatbots are omni-channel solutions, which means that they are able of carrying out interactions on different platforms and apps, including websites, social networks, and text messaging services. Considering current online trends, it’s another thing that educators must leverage to their advantage.

The truth is, even when provided by the best chatbot platform such as SnatchBot, digital assistants are still in their early days of development. AI makes them less limited, and machine learning allows them to improve in a self-sufficient way, but chatbots still cannot cater to more complicated problems.

In practice, this means that a bot won’t be able to discuss the finer details of Goethe’s Faust, but will certainly be capable of providing predetermined guidelines and resources for its analysis. And, when it comes to definitive and universal facts of STEM subjects, for instance, chatbots will never disappoint.
What’s richer in the bot-based learning experience is a two-way interaction that students will receive every time, and by default. At a younger age, it may include an invitation to an educational game; to older students, it may offer a piece of trivia or inspirational quote to make the lesson more fun and gripping.

In addition to 24/7 availability and personalization, all this makes educational chatbots a compelling new addition to the contemporary classroom. In case you don’t have time to design one from scratch, you can find dozens of them at SnatchBot’s Bot Store. Whatever the case, don’t approach your modern students with outdated methods – it will only make them further disengaged from their textbooks.