Christian Löw
ABSTRACT
Many studies have shown that a proper onboarding procedure for freshmen at the university has many positive effects, especially the increase in retention rates. This research project pursues to what extent this process can be technically supported or improved. In the first step, user-centered and participative methods were used to identify the problems together with first-year students, and an onboarding concept was developed. In the second step, the concept was technically implemented and evaluated with quantitative and qualitative research methods. 102 freshmen participated in the following chatbot-based onboarding scavenger hunt, which had a strong focus on network building between the new students. The 12-day onboarding scavenger hunt was conducted at the beginning of the winter semester 2019 with computer science freshmen at the University of Vienna. The evaluation results revealed that the students felt more familiar with the faculty building and the university campus after the scavenger hunt, also met other students, made new friends, and, by participating, their sense of belonging to the student community became stronger.
- Susanne Biundo, Daniel Höller, and Pascal Bercher. 2016. Special Issue on Companion Technologies. KI - Künstliche Intelligenz 30, 1 (2016), 5–9.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke. 2006. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology 3, 2 (2006), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oaGoogle ScholarCross Ref
- A. R.J. Briggs, J. Clark, and I. Hall. 2012. Building bridges: Understanding student transition to university. Quality in Higher Education 18, 1 (2012), 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13538322.2011.614468Google ScholarCross Ref
- Dan Budny. 2001. The Freshman Seminar: Assisting the Freshman Engineering Student’s Transition from High School to College. (2001).Google Scholar
- Dan Budny, Cheryl Paul, and Beth Bateman Newborg. 2010. Impact of Peer Mentoring on Freshmen Engineering Students.Journal of STEM Education 11, 5 (2010), 9–24. http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ907976Google Scholar
- Asbjørn Følstad, Petter Bae Brandtzaeg, Tom Feltwell, Effie L-C. Law, Manfred Tscheligi, and Ewa A. Luger. 2018. SIG: Chatbots for Social Good. In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montreal QC, Canada) (CHI EA ’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article SIG06, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3170427.3185372Google ScholarDigital Library
- Asbjørn Følstad, Marita Skjuve, and Petter Bae Brandtzaeg. 2019. Different Chatbots for Different Purposes: Towards a Typology of Chatbots to Understand Interaction Design. In Internet Science. Springer, 145–156. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17705-8_13Google Scholar
- Charlotte N. Gunawardena, Mary Beth Hermans, Damien Sanchez, Carol Richmond, Maribeth Bohley, and Rebekah Tuttle. 2009. A theoretical framework for building online communities of practice with social networking tools. Educational Media International 46, 1 (mar 2009), 3–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/09523980802588626Google ScholarCross Ref
- Dave Harley, Sandra Winn, Sarah Pemberton, and Paula Wilcox. 2007. Using Texting to Support Students’ Transition to University. Innovations in Education and Teaching International 44, 3(2007), 229–241. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703290701486506Google ScholarCross Ref
- Geraldine Jones, Gabriele Edwards, and Alan Reid. 2009. How can mobile SMS communication support and enhance a first year undergraduate learning environment?ALT-J 17, 3 (nov 2009), 201–218. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687760903247625Google Scholar
- Christian Löw. 2018. Exploring Social Companion Technologies. NordiCHI’18 Doctoral Consortium. University of Vienna.Google Scholar
- Lukas Moshuber. 2020. Grätzelbot: Using a Chatbot-Based Scavenger Hunt to Support Students’ Transition to University“. M.Sc. Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna.Google Scholar
- Pei Luen Patrick Rau, Qin Gao, and Li Mei Wu. 2008. Using mobile communication technology in high school education: Motivation, pressure, and learning performance. Computers and Education 50, 1 (2008), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2006.03.008Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Grätzelbot - Gamifying Onboarding to Support Community-Building among University Freshmen
Recommendations
Grätzelbot: Social Companion Technology for Community Building among University Freshmen
Chatbot Research and DesignAbstractProper onboarding procedures for freshmen (first-semester students) at the university have many positive effects, especially the increase in retention rates. This paper presents Grätzelbot, a chatbot designed to help with onboarding freshmen by ...
Building a community to support HS CS teachers: the disciplinary commons for computing educators
SIGCSE '11: Proceedings of the 42nd ACM technical symposium on Computer science educationIn this paper, we describe our experience in supporting high school CS teachers by building a local community through the Disciplinary Commons for Computing Educators (DCCE) project. The DCCE project is an effort to explore ways of supporting these CS ...
Engineering and computer science community college transfers and native freshmen students: Relationships among participation in extra-curricular and co-curricular activities, connecting to the university campus, and academic success
FIE '12: Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)Research studies have shown the importance of the relationship between “a sense of belonging” and successfully adjusting to college life for undergraduate students. Few studies, however, have compared if native freshmen and transfer students connect to ...
Comments