Development of a Bespoke Chatbot Design Tool to Facilitate a Crowd-based Co-creation Process

Developing an effective educational chatbot is a challenging and time-consuming process. One of the main challenges in a co-creation process, is ensuring multiple stakeholders, as professionals in a variety of roles such as academics, learners, researchers, and subject experts, are all able to contribute successfully. More common online learning resources are designed using traditional methods such as group storyboarding workshops. With chatbot design, it is especially difficult to maintain a group focus on pedagogical requirements while minimizing technological interaction. Furthermore, more time is required to gather sufficient and accurate data used to train a chatbot to the point where it can be deployed for education. This paper describes the development of a web-based chatbot design tool formed to break down these barriers and support the overall design process.