Social-blended learning moderated by Pedagogical Conversational Agents

Customer service and centricity is not only a key driver for the success of businesses but is also an important aspect for modern administrations of cities and municipalities. Closeness to citizen improves living conditions and quality, and thus, plays an important role in considerations regarding the residential location. A citizen-oriented administration is characterized by its well-structured and user-friendly online presentation, customer-friendly opening hours and good availability by phone. These three pillars determine the customer contact.

As many citizens still prefer telephone contact, good availability of the personnel as well as their competence and friendliness come to the fore. However, administrations treat availability by phone only as a side note. Our research with German city councils shows that calls are often unanswered leaving citizens unsatisfied and alone with their matter. It is common that administrations lack comprehensive guidelines about the availability by phone or that employees simply do not follow these rules. To address these issues and to improve availability by phone, the objective of our research is to develop a social-blended learning concept, which is supported by a pedagogical conversational agent, to raise the awareness of employees for availability by phone and to transfer necessary information. 

The goal of this thesis is to develop, test and evaluate learning modules for a social-blended learning concept that is supported by a pedagogical conversational agent. Therein, you will work together with our project partners to explore different didactic possibilities and develop learning modules that are integrated into the selected e-learning platform. Therefore, you will be engaged in various activities including:

• Exploration of the didactic possibilities for a social-blended learning concept supported by a pedagogical conversational agent
• Familiarization with the selected e-learning platform
• Development of learning processes and modules for the concrete use-case
• Integration of learning modules into the e-learning platform
• Evaluation of the learning modules in the field with our project partners

This thesis gives you the opportunity to investigate innovative technologies, specifically pedagogical platforms, and pedagogical conversational agents, in the public sector. Additionally, your work provides the basis for a real-world project that aims to improve the citizen-orientation and -friendliness of administrations.

For this thesis, we are looking for:

• Motivated students with an interest for pedagogical systems, pedagogical conversational agents and for working with qualitative data
• Students should have a knowledge in CSCW and/or HCI and POC
• German knowledge is required 

If you are interested in the topic and think you are the right person to get involved, contact us:

• Dr. Birgit Schenk
• Andreas Bucher