My ongoing final year project.

E-learning is the new booming industry that supplements the human desire of lifelong learning, and MOOC(Massive Open Online Course) is one of the latest tools in eLearning to transform education in a significant way. However, one of the barriers of e-learning platforms is the lack of proper guidance and feedback during the student’s learning process. Due to the high enrolment of the courses, instructors and teaching teams have to deal with a massive class which hardly makes them capable of providing individual feedback for the students. Automatic feedback currently exists in the form such as quizzes and assignments, but they are not personalized and often do not serve the students’ needs.

Therefore, we want to build a chatbot that is integrated in the elearning system and serves as a virtual teaching assistant to handle students’ questions. Since we’ll test the chatbot on a Java course, it will rely on the data we extract from both the course and StackOverflow. Once accepted a question, chatbot will process the question, and perform information retrieval and summarization from course forum and StackOverflow. If student want to directlly ask the real TA, chatbot will classify the problem and autommatically forward it to best matched TA, based on different criteria such as research interest and whether he’s online. If student asks a follow-up question, chatbot should be able to handle it using dialogue tracking technique, which is still a challenging topic.