DESIGNING SIMPLIFIED GUIDELINES FOR INTEGRATING EDUCATIONAL CHATBOTS INTO UNIVERSITY E-LEARNING PLATFORMS

Abstract

This study aims to develop simplified guidelines for integrating educational chatbots into university e-learning platforms during the period 2020–2025, in response to the weak procedural organization that defines the function of these chatbots and the limits of their use within the digital university environment. The study starts from the observation that the available literature has discussed the benefits of educational chatbots, their challenges, and their forms of integration with digital learning platforms, yet it has not sufficiently transformed this body of knowledge into direct design guidelines that specify what the chatbot should answer, what it should refer to the teacher or human support, and how conversational scenarios, language, performance indicators, and safe-use considerations should be organized. The study adopts a conceptual analytical approach based on reviewing the relevant literature, extracting recurring design elements related to the chatbot’s function, the limits of its intervention, the structure of interaction, and the indicators used to evaluate its performance, and then reorganizing these elements into a coherent guideline proposal. The findings show that integrating educational chatbots into university platforms becomes more disciplined when their role is defined explicitly, the points of escalation to human support are specified clearly, conversational scenarios are built around recurring university situations, and responses use clear and specific language. The findings also show that this integration needs to be reviewed through operational indicators that include answer accuracy, response time, student satisfaction, and the rate of escalation to human support, together with embedding privacy, conversation logging, data minimization, and explicit notification of reliability limits within the design itself. The study concludes that the value of educational chatbots within university e-learning platforms does not depend merely on their technical presence, but on the clarity of their function, the limits of their intervention, and the applicability of the guidelines that regulate their use within the platform.