Research conducted at 19 centres of teaching and learning and their equivalents from Canada, the United States, Lebanon, the United Kingdom and France published in August 2020 showed that staff in these centres deployed all available resources to support the rapid switch to online education. Staff had been working 10- to 14-hour workdays during the first phase of the pandemic to meet the increase in faculty and staff needs. These centres also reported difficulty recruiting and training qualified candidates. Used strategically, chatbots could take over repetitive low-level guidance tasks that teaching and learning centres field and help avoid overload. A chatbot, also called a conversational or virtual agent, is a software or computer system designed to communicate with humans using natural language processing.

The ethical and strategic use of artificial intelligence at centres of teaching and learning, which support faculty in troubleshooting and innovating …