ACFAS | What Work Leads and Potentials for Personalized Faculty Resource and Training Recommendations by Conversational Agents [Event in French]

Symposium

544 – Les agents conversationnels (chatbots) en éducation : où en sommes-nous?

Summary

Centres for Teaching and Learning (bureaux de soutien à l’enseignement, BSE) at higher education institutions are working hard to leverage the COVID-19 catalyst. Their goal is to facilitate professional faculty development that will lead to a rapid and sustainable pedagogical transformation and improved education for future generations. These centres lack staff and hours during a day to meet the plethora of needs of a heterogeneous faculty, with varying levels of digital skills, various andragogical approaches, different schedules, different teaching areas and levels of resistance to change. Customized training solutions are not realistic. On the other hand, a large number of professors have faced significant challenges since the outbreak of the pandemic: filtering and sorting through the plethora of training and resources that are provided by support offices and their faculties, and targeting those they needed at the time they needed them. 

This presentation will share the results of a literature review around the potential of conversational agents to provide personalized recommendations for training, development, and upgrading activities and resources by academic support offices for faculty members as well as tailored coaching in times of crisis but also in times of mandated, even desired, educational transformation.

Speakers

Nadia Naffi – Université Laval , Ann-Louise Davidson – Concordia University , Bruno Kesangana – Université Laval, Mehdi Rougui – Université Laval