Chatbot boosts student wellbeing at University of Pretoria

The University of Pretoria (UP) is among the top universities in Africa; home to one of Africa’s leading Masters in Business Administration programmes and internationally acclaimed for producing socially impactful research. In addition to providing the highest quality of academic teaching and learning to students tackling the opportunity of driving inclusivity from both rural and urban areas, UP is also committed to helping them leave university as confident, well-rounded and responsible citizens fully prepared for the wider world.

UP considers itself more than a university — it is a way of life underpinned by striving for excellence, giving back to society, and living an ethical, caring life

Providing mental health services

The Student Counselling Unit (SCU) offers its 50,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students support resources to optimise studying, make the best career choices and better manage their wellbeing. University students are particularly vulnerable to mental health struggles as they're often living away from home for the first time, navigating new social groups, and having to study independently. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has worsened this, and more students than ever before are disclosing mental health illnesses. SCU’s services, which include cognitive training, academic help, individual consultations, workshops, and webinars, are used by 16,000 students each year. Seeing first-hand the positive impact its services have on students, especially as lockdowns were put into place, SCU wanted to make them available to more students, 24 hours a day. The department turned to Dr Wimpie Beeken, senior IT project manager in the ICT Capability Development Management team, for help. 

Enriching the student experience through technology 

UP has long been at the forefront of using innovative technology to deliver a better student experience. Initiatives include the trailblazing UP Mobile app, a convenient way for students, staff and alumni to access a comprehensive range of university info, data and services, as well as the library assistant robot, known as Libby, built with Google technologies. 

Many of the university’s exciting digital initiatives have benefited from the guidance of Beeken. With a team of 350 people Beeken is a passionate advocate about how technology is reshaping the future of education. “Our team develops projects across all aspects of university life to aid faculty and students,” he explains. “It’s exciting to lead these types of initiatives. We get to explore and use the latest technologies and apply them in a way that has a real impact on the lives of students.” 

Choosing Google also enabled the UP and DotModus teams to take advantage of a range of sophisticated, artificial intelligence-based Google tools when building the bot. For example, SCU-B uses Dialogflow, a natural language understanding platform used to build conversational applications. 

Dialogflow recognises intent and context, allowing the students to have a realistic conversational experience with SCU-B, and enabling the bot to direct the students to relevant and useful resources. As with all chatbots, SCU-B uses artificial intelligence to develop and grow. It can take new example sentences, consider them and learn them. The more students use it, the smarter SCU-B will be. 

The UP team can also make content changes or add content without disruption. Thomas Fowler, DotModus CEO says: “When building any sort of service, we’re constantly thinking about not just the immediate implementation, but what the future holds. That’s why Google is such a great platform. It ensures that everything we build can scale, can grow and can continually meet the needs of UP’s student population.” 

A Collaborative Effort

By working closely with Digicloud Africa, Google’s enablement partner in Africa, DotModus gains access to the best resources to help its customers maximise the potential of services from Google. For example, SCU-B uses Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud SQL, Google App Engine and Cloud Scheduler. SCU-B also takes advantage of in-browser text-to-speech and speech-to-text functionality. 

By using this technology already built into mobile phones, the team at DotModus were able to keep the overhead mobile internet data use (and therefore the cost) to a minimum. “Inequalities in access to higher education in SA continue to be a challenge,” says Fowler. “For example, many students from rural or underprivileged areas cannot afford mobile data. That’s why we were so focused on ensuring SCU-B was as cheap as possible for students to use.” 

SCU and DotModus worked together to design the messages SCU-B shows, to achieve the right tone of voice for the chatbot. With equitable access in mind, there was also a collaborative effort with the Disability Unit at UP so images have the correct alternative text and that students using screen readers were able to use SCU-B. The project moved from concept to reality in a matter of months. “DotModus gave us carte blanche. Their never-say-no attitude allowed us to build every requirement of our idea and their openness of engagement meant that every team member and stakeholder was on board and involved from day one,” says Beeken. 

Proactively anticipating the needs of students 

Early responses from the student population have been positive. Launched during the pandemic, when many students were experiencing difficulties in adjusting academically and feeling socially isolated, the initial uptake of the service was fast, and has continued to grow steadily since. The convenience of using technology that’s already in the students’ pockets has proven to be a great draw. 

Says Beeken: “SCU-B enables us to share resources in a manner that the students are comfortable with, through their mobile phone. They can access the help they need, whenever they need it from wherever they may be.” 

The anonymised usage reports from the bot are also providing useful insights to SCU. In addition to providing regular snapshots into the overall wellbeing of the student population at any given time, they reveal which resources are being used most. By pulling together different streams of data, SCU is starting to intelligently predict students’ needs (for example when exams are looming) and proactively provide guides and tools to help. 

Beeken already has plans to expand SCU-B’s services. UP intends to add a third bot, creating an ecosystem in which bots support students across a range of services, while keeping data and information private and secure. “Ultimately we want to join all the bots together so they share knowledge and data. This approach will result in a more consistent experience to students when searching for and discovering information, and the conversational experience will keep getting richer too,” he says.

This article was paid for by the University of Pretoria.