Our primary users of the Student Success Assistant are first-year and early-college students at IU-Indianapolis. These students are often navigating high-pressure deadlines while simultaneously learning the university's digital sources. Our tool is specifically designed for those who may not yet be familiar with the expensive professional software provided through their tuition.
Currently, the university provides excellent technical support through the standard UITS chatbot. However, that system is primarily reactive as it is designed for troubleshooting when things break (e.g., "I can't log in" or "The Wi-Fi is down").
There is a missing link for students who are in a proactive creative phase. Many students struggle to start assignments because they don't know which tools exist or how to use them. They often resort to paid third-party apps or inefficient means simply because they aren't aware that premium tools like Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft 365 are already accessible.
Our Student Success Assistant acts as a digital info center to university resources. Instead of waiting for a technical error, our artifact interprets a student's academic goal and directs them to the right tool for the job. Our chat bot translates a student's natural language (e.g., "I need to make a poster") into actionable UITS resources.
What makes us unique? We are:
- Goal-oriented, not tool-oriented: We don't expect students to know the names of the software. They provide the goal as we provide the solution.
- Value transparency: Our artifact explicitly highlights the professional value of IU resources (e.g., "This tool is worth $240/year, and you own it for free") to encourage adoption.
- Student-to-student design: Built by interns who understand the specific stresses of the first-year experience, the tone is approachable, empathetic, and efficient.
We invite you to interact with our current build! Please keep in mind that this is an active development prototype. Because this is a peer-to-peer prototype, the program is currently hosted locally. It is functional only when the developer's workstation is active. To ensure accuracy during our pilot phase, we have focused the bot's current intelligence on two high-frequency student needs: File conversion (e.g., Word to PDF) and getting started with Adobe Express.
How to interact:
- Open the Chat Interface.
- Ask a question.
- Follow the Guide: The bot will provide information to the IU resource.
Yujin Seong - Major: Business Management and International Studies
Chidi Adabanya - Major: Computer Science
Description of the video:
I'm Yujin, a Gen AI student intern
here at UWIT. This semester, my
teammate Chidi and I set out to
reimagine how students interact with campus
technology, and we've developed a
specialized AI artifact called the Student
Success Assistant. Through our research
and our own experiences as students, we found
a common hurdle, that students often
get lost where to start the projects and
assignments, and they're not always aware of the
expensive professional software like Adobe
and Microsoft 365 that is already covered
by their tuition. There is a chat
bot within our UITS website currently
and it is great for troubleshooting technical
errors but we did see a need for a dedicated
success assistant that can introduce our
resources that the university and our
UITS department have that students already have access to. So our artifact solves
this by acting as a digital front
door that's bridging the gap between a
student's creative goal and the university's
premium resources. In our collaboration,
Chidi led the technical
implementation while I focused on the
user experience and technical or
strategic design. And now I'll walk
you through my design process and how we
structured the bot to feel intuitive and helpful
for the student journey. If you look here, also
I apologize for using the separate device
to show you guys our prototype because it
was too slow to operate the screen recording
and this design simultaneously but I put
some logos options we haven't decided yet but
these are some options and this is our example
prompt also here it'll say online and stuff
and some more there's star rating function as
well and we conducted an interview on campus
and heard feedback from students that
they would like a short concise answer from a
chatbot but they wish they had a choice to
see longer and better answers so we adapted
that idea into a button here saying
better answer and I also created the setting
part it says swipe right for setting and they
are in the sticky notes design. I think it was
pretty cute and user -friendly as our target
audience are students on our campus at
Indianapolis and it does have all the subcategories
per each category of the function like
design customization. There are color, font,
and size and there are some more but
please note that we didn't apply all these
designed functions into our current
program but if we get to actually launch our
system we have every intention to
include all these so following that Chidi
will show how he's transformed these
designs into a functional program and walk you
through the technical build and user
interaction. Thank you. So today we have our
tech mentor project. Status is online says,
"What are you working on today?"
That's the
message displayed by you know me until you click
on one of the prompts here you could say
you could just select one that says video
editing presentation, convert word
to pdf, you could choose video editing. It
loads for a bit and it gives us a response
based on this. It gives us a response based
on what you search up. You could say, "how do
I use apps remotely?" And then you hit send. I even type it right here, but you know
IU apps remotely, IUanyWare.
You ask any question based on the
services IU provides the tech services IU
provides and it gives you responses tailored
to IU students specifically it's
powered by ollama to avoid the use of
tokens and stuff just so you can have a
visual of what it's going to look like
eventually in the background it takes in
your questions like these are the questions that
you ask so it takes in your questions and
then it gives it a score. It picks the response
to the best score and gives it to you
based on the prompts you put in. So, that's how
we select what input file to use for any
question you ask so its answers come from
whatever we give it so you can't ask it something
that's unrelated to IU services because it
would immediately find a way to route itself
back to an IU answer.
