Intelligent Conversational Bot for Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs)

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) which were introduced in 2008 has since drawn attention around the world for both its advantages as well as criticism on its drawbacks. One of the issues in MOOCs which is the lack of interactivity with the instructor has brought conversational bot into the picture to fill in this gap. In this study, a prototype of MOOCs conversational bot, MOOC-bot is being developed and integrated into MOOCs website to respond to the learner’s enquiries using text or speech input. MOOC-bot is using the popular Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) to develop its knowledge base, leverage from AIML’s capability to deliver appropriate responses and can be quickly adapted to new knowledge domains. The system architecture of MOOC-bot consists of knowledge base along with AIML interpreter, chat interface, MOOCs website and Web Speech API to provide speech recognition and speech synthesis capability. The initial MOOC-bot prototype has the general knowledge from the past Loebner Prize winner ALICE, course’s frequent asked questions, and a course’s content offered by Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM). The evaluation of MOOC-bot based on the past competition questions from Chatterbox Challenge (CBC) and Loebner Prize has shown that it was able to provide correct answers most of the time during the test and demonstrated the capability to prolong the conversation. The advantages of MOOCbot such as able to provide 24-hour service that can serve different time zones, able to have knowledge in multiple domains, and can be shared by multiple sites simultaneously have outweighed its existing limitations.