Not sure if Luis is still interested in the post as Northwestern has shared their IBM Watson solution at InstructureCon 2018.
Not surprisingly, the first item as shown in their "Lessons Learned" slide indicates "It's a lot of work!!!". Indeed it requires a lot of investment to build an enterprise-level solution.
As for Lusis' original question, I can NOT answer the 2nd and 3rd parts.
But, for the 1st part, I personally feel very happy with a simple ChatBot to serve
- as a virtual agent to facilitate virtual office hours on a 24x7 basis in Canvas courses
- students can ask critical concepts, key problems, and general questions anytime, anywhere
- as a virtual agent to answer a number of Canvas support questions (QnA/FAQ type) before users contact our local Solution Center or Instructure support (as a matter of fact, more than 1/3 of our 7000+ Instructure tickets can be resolved instantaneously by asking the bot)
- as a virtual agent to answer FAQs on any web sites, such as Prospective Students, New Employee Onboarding, Success Community, etc. Only one line of simple <iframe> code is needed (for embedding purpose)
The beauty of this kind of bot is that it requires zero technology background.
- As long as one can type, within 15 to 30 minutes or so, anyone can spin up a bot.
- With additional 10 minutes or so, an intelligent knowledge base can be set up ready for users to ask questions.
- With a few clicks, this bot can be integrated in Slack/Teams. (I like it a lot when using it with MS Teams.)
For sure, if one has some luxury to have certain programming skills, this kind of bot can be even published as a voice app right on your Windows 10 computers or mobile devices. So users can talk with the bot instead of typing only.
To make it clear, anyone can start testing it out by using Azure free account service. For Internet2 customers, the whole (basic) setup on Azure only costs several cents per month or less while it can be used anywhere including support web page and Canvas courses.
If interested, please see my (muted) demo at Arc. First 20 to 30 seconds will be good enough to give one a basic idea on how to use a bot in general support and Canvas courses.
For any institutions that uses ServiceNow or similar services, (local) Canvas support can be provided within ServiceNow instead of using this kind of simple bot. The agent transition (from virtual to live) is pretty slim.
If interested, I have a prototype (muted) demo on Arc. Please be aware that the video is about our course evaluation system integrated with Canvas.
@kona , let us wait and see how Canvas Release: Analytics Beta (Course Grade) will benefit our teaching/learning. Less than 2 weeks from now.
