bioTutor: A Lecture-Specific AI-Chatbot for Biology Classes

Project description

Acquiring a sound understanding of concepts is a prerequisite for successfully studying at ETH and enables students to tackle interdisciplinary issues and future challenges. Critical examination of one's own knowledge plays a key role in this. However, the constantly increasing number of students poses a major challenge for lecturers to ensure that the requirements for a personalized education are met in the future. The rapid development and spread of new technologies such as ChatGPT are opening up new possibilities for learning support; at the same time, however, it is also clear that their direct use at universities is accompanied by limitations in terms of factual accuracy, didactic embedding and benefits for learning and teaching.

In this project, we want to investigate the effectiveness of a biology-specific AI-based chatbot on student learning. The ready-to-use, self-developed chatbot "bioTutor" offers a constructivist learning environment and is specifically tailored to lecture content. This enables an individualized learning experience with personalized feedback and promotes learning by working on biological topics while incorporating prior knowledge. The bioTutor differs from classic chatbots in that, as part of the conversations, further topic-relevant questions are asked, which are answered by the students and thus critically reflected upon. The tool can be used in lectures to consolidate knowledge and prepare for exams. The learning process can be tracked by lecturers via detailed usage analyses so that comprehension difficulties can be identified early on and students can be given targeted support.