Arthur Chickering is Distinguished Professor of Higher Education at Memphis State University. On leave from the Directorship of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Memphis State, he is Visiting Professor at George Mason University. Zelda Gamson is a sociologist who holds appointments at the John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan.

Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education: Faculty Inventory. Institutional Inventory.

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Internationalizing the Curriculum

Annual report 2017-18

In this chapter, we provide a review of conversational agents (CAs), discussing chatbots, intended for casual conversation with a user, as well as task-oriented agents that generally engage in discussions intended to reach one or several specific goals, often (but not always) within a specific domain. We also consider the concept of embodied conversational agents, briefly reviewing aspects such as character animation and speech processing. The many different approaches for representing dialogue in CAs are discussed in some detail, along with methods for evaluating such agents, emphasizing the important topics of accountability and interpretability. A brief historical overview is given, followed by an extensive overview of various applications, especially in the fields of health and education. We end the chapter by discussing benefits and potential risks regarding the societal impact of current and future CA technology.

Conversational Agents: Theory and Applications

Conversational Agents (CAs) are widely spread in a variety of domains, such as health and customer service. There is a recent trend of increasing publications and implementations of CAs in education. We conduct a systematic literature review to identify common methodologies, pedagogical CA roles, addressed target groups, the technologies and theories behind, as well as human-like design aspects. The initially found 3329 records were systematically reduced to 252 fully coded articles. Based on the analysis of the codings, we derive further research streams. Our results reveal a research gap for longterm studies on the use of CAs in education, and there is insufficient holistic design knowledge for pedagogical CAs. Moreover, target groups other than academic students are rarely considered. We condense our findings in a morphological box and conclude that pedagogical CAs have not yet reached their full potential of long-term practical application in education.

Conversational Agents in Education - A Systematic Literature Review

Internationalisation of the curriculum (IoC) is on the agenda of many higher education (HE) institutions worldwide. Typically seen as associated with a top-down strategy, IoC often meets resistance from university teachers, many of whom struggle to understand its relevance to teaching practice. This phenomenographic study investigates university teachers’ conceptions of IoC. Five conceptions ranging in sophistication have been identified. The least sophisticated focuses on making the curriculum content internationally relevant, whereas the most sophisticated centres around developing self-awareness, awareness of others, and a change in mindset in students. The latter is realised by embracing reflexivity and criticality and, more importantly, utilising societal and political issues as learning opportunities for identity development. Situated in the Hong Kong context, the findings not only suggest the need for teachers to shift their focus from curriculum content to value-based development but also for educators to reflect on their role in helping students to reconcile their identity in relation to their counterparts regionally and globally.

University teachers’ conceptions of internationalisation of the curriculum: a phenomenographic study

One of the technologies that educators can leverage is the use of chatbots or conversational agent to support teaching and learning. Moreover, with the recent advancement in AI, companies like Google, IBM, and Amazon provide platforms that are focused on building conversation rather than the technicalities of computer programing, in particular, natural language processing. In this case study, we will look into the application of a simple rule-based chatbot, based on Google DialogFlow, in a teaching assistant training course run by a Center for Education Innovation at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. We will unpack the details of how a chatbot can be integrated into both online and face-to-face content to augment some of the challenges that can be encountered in teaching.

Chatbot as a learning resource? Creating conversational bots as a supplement for teaching assistant training course

Developing academics’ capacity for internationalizing the curriculum (IoC) is essential but challenging. There is a lack of understanding of how the IoC framework can be implemented in reality and ...

Developing Academics’ Capacity for Internationalizing the Curriculum: A Collaborative Autoethnography of a Cross-Institutional Project:

ABSTRACT Internationalisation of the curriculum (IoC) as an important element of internationalisation has seen many challenges. The literature shows that successful IoC cases are rare. Drawing on the concepts of powerful knowledge and ‘knowing’, we argue that a more comprehensive understanding of knowledge engagement in the IoC process is needed. Currently, engaging knowledge appears to be a barrier to IoC, particularly in hard disciplines such as science and engineering. This study investigated how faculty members from different disciplines engaged knowledge in their approaches to IoC through semi-structured interviews with 34 faculty members based in three Hong Kong universities. The findings show that engaging knowledge is indispensable to IoC because it provides theoretical foundations for ‘being’ and substantiates discussions on global issues using disciplinary lenses. Furthermore, faculty members from all disciplines show productive ways of engaging knowledge, whilst the differences lie in the expected role of ‘knower’ and the relationship between ‘knowing’ and ‘being’. Specifically, facilitating an intimate relationship between ‘knowing’ and ‘being’ through students’ own dispositions was featured in soft disciplines, whilst taking perspectives based on scientific principles was identified in hard disciplines.

Beatrice C. B. Chu

Papers

University teachers’ conceptions of internationalisation of the curriculum: a phenomenographic study

Chatbot as a learning resource? Creating conversational bots as a supplement for teaching assistant training course

Developing Academics’ Capacity for Internationalizing the Curriculum: A Collaborative Autoethnography of a Cross-Institutional Project:

Are some disciplines ‘hard to engage’? A cross-disciplinary analysis of university teachers’ approaches to internationalisation of the curriculum