A user-centric framework for educational chatbots design and development

Increasing frequency of epidemics, such as SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, Ebola, and the recent COVID-19, have affected various sectors, especially education. As a result, emphasis on e-learning and distance learning has been increasing in recent years. The growing numbers of mobile users and access to the internet across the world has created more favorable conditions for adopting distance learning on a wider scale. However, lessons learnt from current experiments have highlighted poor student engagement with learning processes, hence a user-centric approach to design and develop educational chatbots is presented. A User-centric approach enables developers to consider the following: learners’ and teachers’ technological skills and competencies, attitudes, and perceptions and behaviour; conceptual concerns, such as pedagogical integration on online platforms, assessment procedures, varying learning culture and lifestyles; technical concerns, such as privacy, security, performance, ubiquity; and regulatory concerns, such as policies, frameworks, standards, ethics, roles and responsibilities have been identified in this study. To address these concerns, there is the need for user-centric design and collaborative approaches to the development of distance learning tools. Considering the abovementioned challenges and the growing emphasis on distance learning, we propose chatbot learning as an effective and efficient tool for delivering such learning. In this regard, a user-centric framework for designing chatbot learning applications and a collaborative user-centric design methodology for developing chatbot learning applications is proposed and discussed.