IIT-Guwahati's AI-enabled chatbot to help students with personalized learning

GUWAHATI: A team of postgraduate students of IIT-Guwahati, along with their faculty members, are developing an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled chatbot to teach and support students by providing smart content and helping personalized learning. The team hopes that the chatbot will be of particular help in classroom situations where poor teacher-student ratio remains a cause for concern.
Titled ALBELA, the chatbot aims to teach and support the first year students of electrical & electronics engineering (EEE) department of IIT-Guwahati. All the researchers are from the electrical & electronics engineering department.
The AI-enabled chatbot is also expected to be capable of addressing queries and doubts of the approximately 850 students of the department. But once the chatbot is in a fully functional mode, the services will be extended to all other courses in the institute.
"We have been working on its development for the last seven months with a team of seven research scholars of the department. Earlier, we did trial runs and we have started using it from this academic session onwards. The response from the students has been overwhelming and we hope that this will become the new normal in near future. Professor Rohit Sinha, head of EEE department, and the team IBM have extended their continuous support for this activity," said Praveen Kumar, professor of EEE department at IIT-Guwahati.
ALBELA helps students by providing an easy interface where details of classes and tutorials can be found easily. Besides, students can look up their class schedules, tutorial schedules, examination queries and more through a simple AI-based chat window. Students at times may hesitate to approach an instructor regarding their queries but with this chat-based system, they can get their doubts cleared easily.
As the first-year students can have numerous doubts related to content such as preferred textbooks, reference books, notes and sample questions, the chatbot is trained to answer all these queries.
The team experts said that the use of chatbot to clear doubts of the students can be fascinating to students and help increasing their interest in the subject, which may result in better learning outcomes.
Explaining the working model of the chatbot, professor Samarendra Dandapat of the EEE department in IIT-Guwahati said, "The team is developing the chatbot's analytical problem-solving skill. It will be helpful for the students to learn how to solve analytical problems related to the course."