Engaging Students With a Chatbot-Based Academic Advising System

Advising systems automate aspects of academic advising. Traditionally, advising systems focused on specialized tasks such as course selection. Recently, chatbot-based advising systems have emerged as they emulate scenario-based advising. Nevertheless, the design of most chatbot-based advising systems is not user-centric, potentially causing a lack of adoption. Further, there is a lack of studies reporting findings of usability evaluation of chatbot-based advising systems. In response, we contribute a chatbot-based academic advising system, MyAdvisor, that helps students with prescriptive academic inquiries. The system is based on real advising scenarios and designed with usability principles. The results show that students learn the system fast and find it helpful. This work contributes (1) scenario-based functional requirements and usability requirements of the chatbot-based advising system, (2) the application of usability heuristics in the design of the system, and (3) findings of empirically evaluating the system usability.