Published 25 September 2023
UNSW’s A.I.D.E. Chatbot– a popular chatbot for teaching and education staff – is undergoing a significant upgrade. With the aim of utilising OpenAI and ChatGPT technology, it will be able to provide a smarter, more interactive user experience. For the duration of the upgrade pilot, the chatbot will move away from the Teaching Gateway and will only be accessible inside Moodle.
Prad Duraisamy, Manager for Educational Technology Support at the PVCESE Portfolio, explains more.
Why is the functionality of our chatbot changing?
Since its launch back in 2019, our chatbot has answered 61,018 queries and served 12,679 users. We know it is a vital support tool for our UNSW staff and we are now looking into using latest tech to make it even more useful.
Essentially, we are updating the technology behind the existing bot. This will build us a pathway to integrate with new cutting-edge OpenAI and ChatGPT technology, that would provide our colleagues a smarter, more interactive user experience in the near future. We want to provide a safer and reliable conversational service and thus we're moving away from outdated, end-of-life technology to ensure reliability and security.
What is new about it?
With updated knowledge, now the Chatbot will be able to answer Moodle Enhance theme and Inspera related queries.
To date, our Education Technology team had to “teach” the bot answers to common questions. Now, the chatbot will stay up to date by “reading” respective Educational Technology pages on the Teaching Gateway, which are being continuously updated. The bot can also be leveraged to directly contact our internal EdTech Hub team, by accessing it from the Moodle course's side panel (block drawer), without interfering with the Moodle content.
To reduce confusion, for the duration of the pilot, our chatbot will be available in Moodle, but not on the Teaching Gateway. Once the new bot reaches maturity, we plan to bring the bot back to the Teaching Gateway pages.
Below is a screenshot of the Chatbot in Moodle
How can this help teaching and education colleagues?
Colleagues can seek assistance from chatbot on any Moodle/Inspera features. They can also check for issues and outages of these systems to plan ahead and stay updated on progress of the bug reported.
If a user needs direct help from a human or is not satisfied with the response from chatbot, it can escalate their query directly to our Ed Tech Hub team, with the chat history included.
We encourage colleagues to take some time to interact with the updated chatbot and provide us with feedback – you can do this via the bot, by escalating as a ‘ticket’.
Please note that this is a steppingstone for us to build an AI-driven chatbot that would provide personalised course assistance for both staff and students.