T-Bot and Q-Bot: A couple of AIML-based bots for tutoring courses and evaluating students

Intelligent tutoring systems are computer programs that aim at providing personalized instruction to students. In recent years, conversational robots, usually known as chatterbots, become very popular in the Internet, and ALICE (artificial linguistic internet computer entity) is probably the most popular one. ALICE brain is written in AIML (artificial intelligence markup language), an open XML language. We consider the combination of both approaches, i.e, the use of AIML-based bots for tutoring purposes in open e-learning platforms like Claroline or Moodle. With that aim in mind, we have developed two different bots for helping the students during the learning process and for supporting the teaching activities of the professor. One of them is a tutor bot (T-Bot), and is able to analyse the requests made by the learners in written natural language and to provide adequate and domain specific answers orienting the student to the right course contents. The other one is an evaluation bot (Q-Bot), and is oriented to track and supervise the student progress by means of personalized questionnaires. Both bots have been already developed and integrated as user-friendly modules in Claroline and Moodle.