Technical Architecture of an AI Chatbot that uses a Social Network and Cloud-based Database to Support Work-Integrated Education for Undergraduates

Getting students well-prepared for the workplace is an important goal of many universities. We investigated the use of a conversational agent to support undergraduates in completing the subject of Work-Integrated Education (WIE). The WIE subject requires 300 hours of working experience, documents and forms as evidence, and a reflective learning statement. Despite having conducted seminars and provided Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on the university website, career advisors still received repetitive questions in the FAQs. To provide timelier and out-of-class support to students, the investigators built WIEBot to answer student questions via Telegram, a social media platform. As this is an innovative approach that may be useful to other higher education institutions, we decided to verify the feasibility of building WIEBot using cloud technologies and social media. Based on this successful experience, we provide some suggestions for further development of similar chatbots for student support. This study contributes to raising awareness and providing information on using and developing chatbots in education.