(262b) A Chatbot Teaching Assistant for Improving Student Success

Higher education has had to quickly adapt to the challenges and opportunities presented by artificial intelligence (AI). Many educational institutions have formed policies regarding the ethical and appropriate use of AI within the classroom and in the support of fundamental and applied research [1-5]. Furthermore, there are several colleges and universities that have developed AI curricula in science and engineering, as well as in the humanities [6-18]. Some of these programs are housed inside of academic schools or departments, whereas others are at an institutional level. All of these are very interdisciplinary in nature.

This work discusses our collaboration towards supporting both academic and personal student success. We have developed a series of innovative large language models (LLM), though our BarkPlug platform, to address several important issues that promote student persistence, retention and graduation.

• Our chatbot serves as a recruiting assistant, helping guide undecided students who are interested in engineering but are unsure of what type. Our LLM guides the student through a series of questions which builds a prompt to aid them in narrowing down their choices to a smaller number of majors.
• The chatbot also can support students who have made a clear choice as to what major they want to study. The bot helps explain the opportunities associated with a degree from their chosen field of study.
• Many current students require assistance from student support resources. Our bot helps direct students to those resources in an anonymous, yet available, manner.
• To foster increased persistence, retention and graduation, we have developed a series of virtual teaching assistants to support students in classes with high DFW rates.

We will report on these tools with a specific focus on chemical engineering programs of student and courses.

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