Using chatbots to support student goal setting and social presence in fully online activities: learner engagement and perceptions

“Perceived usefulness is “the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would enhance his or her job performance” (Davis, 1989, p. 320).”

“Purposeful sampling is widely used in qualitative research to identify information-rich cases related to the phenomenon of interest (Palinkas et al., 2015).”

“Social presence can be defined as “the ability of participants to project themselves socially and emotionally, as real people” (Garrison et al., 1999, p. 94).”

“The first chatbot, ELIZA, developed in 1966, simulated a psychotherapist’s conversation with humans, where users could communicate with ELIZA by entering text inputs, and the chatbot would respond in kind (Weizenbaum, 1966).”

“According to social response theory (Nass & Moon, 2000), human–computer interactions are basically social where humans have the innate tendency to perceive computers as social beings, even when they know that machines do not have feelings or intentions.”

“It is therefore suggested that in the long-term use of chatbot, it is important to add variety to sustain the interest in learning with the chatbot (Keller, 1987), by either simplifying or making some changes to the reoccurring sentences.”

“By interacting with an anthropomorphized machine, a user may perceive a sense of social presence (Adam et al., 2021).”

“These self-reflections can influence subsequent forethought processes (Zimmerman, 2013).”

“This finding was consistent with those of previous research, as a more recent review on chatbot research revealed that the limited intelligence was the most frequently reported challenge in using chatbots (Huang et al., 2022).”

“Previous studies have suggested that social presence can reduce stress and the sense of loneliness (Whiteside et al., 2014), and enhance student satisfaction with the course (Richardson et al., 2017).”

“For example, the Wordsworth chatbot provides users quiz questions to test their vocabulary skills (Smutny & Schreiberova, 2020).”

“Research on student disengagement in online courses has revealed several factors that can lead to student disengagement—this includes the lack of student self-regulation (Barrot et al., 2021; Pedrotti & Nistor, 2019), and the sense of isolation (Barrot et al., 2021; Chametzky, 2021).”

“Moreover, based on the principles of multimedia use for learning (Mayer, 2017), individuals can learn better when the learning contents are presented in the form of a conversation.”

“Besides the lack of self-regulation skills, online students also feel a sense of isolation (Bączek et al., 2021; Chametzky, 2021) due to the lack of interactions among the participants in the online space (Wut & Xu, 2021).”

“(Student E) c) Raise awareness SRL could be easily ignored in that it mainly relates to the learning strategies rather than learning contents.”

“To improve students’ perceived usefulness of chatbot activities, we highlight the need for having pedagogical foci in education chatbots (mentioned by Wollny et al., 2021) and encourage teachers to participate in the chatbot design process.”

“To help us design the chatbot, we refer to the specific categories of social presence described by Garrison (2011): interpersonal communication, open communication, and cohesive communication.”

“In recent years, the use of chatbots has become widespread in many sectors such as retail customer service and internet banking (Følstad & Brandtzæg, 2017).”

“The “when” and “where” of students’ working on the online contents is often up to the students themselves to decide which significantly increases the level of student self-regulation (Hartley & Bendixen, 2001).”

“Students were required to think about the prompts (e.g., What are your goals when learning from this homework video?) and answer the question in order to continue the video (e.g., van Alten et al., 2020).”

“The SMART method is commonly considered as the standard for developing effective, measurable goals and is widely used for developing program goals and objectives (Bjerke & Renger, 2017).”

“Out-of-class practice is essential to students’ improvement in foreign language learning due to the insufficient time in classroom (García Botero et al., 2019; Kennedy & Levy, 2009).”

“Besides the lack of self-regulation skills, online students also feel a sense of isolation (Bączek et al., 2021; Chametzky, 2021) due to the lack of interactions among the participants in the online space (Wut & Xu, 2021).”

“Perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use have a direct impact on people’s intentions to use an information tool or system (He et al., 2018).”

“To help students set goals, previous studies have employed a variety of means such as the use of prompts embedded in lecture videos (Moos & Bonde, 2016; van Alten et al., 2020; Wong et al., 2021).”

“Even though recent video-conferencing technologies such as Zoom can enable online conversation that mimics real-time face-to-face conversation, 33% of 400 respondents stated that they were less willing to respond to questions during Zoom sessions compared with traditional in-person lessons (Cavinato et al., 2021).”

“, watching videos and reading materials) by themselves before having a synchronous online meeting with teachers and classmates (Jia et al., 2022).”

“So far, commercial industries prefer to use rule-based chatbots, as the rule-based chatbots can achieve higher accuracy in responding to users’ inputs than self-learnable chatbots which can learn from users’ inputs but are not yet well-developed (Thorat & Jadhav, 2020).”

“However, many online students lack self-regulation skills and are not ready for conducting autonomous learning (Wong et al., 2021).”

“Disengagement has been conceptualised as students not participating in or withdrawing from the course activities (Chipchase et al., 2017).”

“This is important because by raising students’ awareness of using goal setting strategies in their learning, students can be trained to become better self-regulated learners (Handoko et al., 2019).”

“EFL learners have long recognized listening as a challenging skill to acquire (Nushi & Orouji, 2020).”

“Rule-based chatbots can recognize user’s queries based on a set of pre-defined rules, by which the responses from this type of chatbots are precise (Singh et al., 2019).”

“The dropout rates in online higher education remain a pressing and persistent problem (Xavier & Meneses, 2020).”

“Out-of-class practice is essential to students’ improvement in foreign language learning due to the insufficient time in classroom (García Botero et al., 2019; Kennedy & Levy, 2009).”

“Recent investigations of self-regulation strategies in online learning settings stressed the key role of goal-setting (Pedrotti & Nistor, 2019).”

“In out-of-class online learning, students usually complete online learning activities (e.g., watching videos and reading materials) by themselves before having a synchronous online meeting with teachers and classmates (Jia et al., 2022).”

“A fallback message refers to a response given by the chatbot that expresses uncertainty and suggests alternative solutions (Følstad & Taylor, 2020) such as I am sorry, I do not understand.”

“In the goal setting process, learners will define the outcomes for their learning and propose how they plan to reach their goals (Nussbaumer et al., 2011).”

“Despite the advantages of fully online courses such as convenience and cost benefit to students, and economies of scale benefit to institutions, more often than not, fully online courses suffer mostly from a lack of student engagement (Starr-Glass, 2020).”

“Cauldwell (2018) pointed out that it is horrible for students when they feel that “only me” have this problem, and everyone else is doing good.”

“Goal setting is a key element in this phase which refers to students deciding on the intended outcomes of a learning effort (Schwarzenberg & Navon, 2020).”

“Self-regulated students are more likely to perform better in their learning (Lachmann & Kiefel, 2012).”

“…more complex structures designed by commercial developers for language learning (e.g., Wang et al., 2023), and (3) customized chatbots created by researchers or teachers for particular language learning contexts using visual chat-bot development platforms (e.g., Hew et al., 2023; Lee & Jeon, 2022).”

“Moreover, a study by Hew et al. ( 2023) revealed that faculty members appreciated the convenience and accessibility of chatbots in providing instant feedback to students.”