Martha, your digital friend for support at University

Features and functionality
Support topics and general information
Help page
Application start page

Inspiration

UK Universities have experienced a significant increase in the number of students undertaking undergraduate courses in recent years, driven by inclusive government policies to widen access and recruit students from diverse backgrounds with different profiles. The transition from school to university life can be challenging for students and navigating it successfully can often mean the difference between the completion of their studies or early withdrawal from their course, where the failure to retain students can lead to financial implications for both the student and the institution. One of the principal reasons for student withdrawal at this stage is isolation, where they failed to engage with the University and fellow students. To address this problem Universities have improved the induction process to make it more social and pro-active. However, there is a still a large lecture-based element to the process, where key staff give presentations related to attendance, work ethic and the expectations of the University while also providing an overview and links to support resources and related services. Unfortunately, the students quickly become overwhelmed with the amount of information and material provided, typically PowerPoint presentations and documents, which is subsequently siloed inside unfamiliar and hard to search and navigate virtual learning environments. New ways of frictionless access to this material were needed.

What it does

This application repurposes extensive existing student support and induction material as an interactive experience where information is easily accessible in bite sizes across a number of platforms and devices through a conversational interface facilitated by a Sumerian host on an as needed and just in time basis. The application will become part of the induction, orientating and onboarding process and support students through their undergraduate studies.

Martha, is named after the founder of the College, and focusses on resources and support material mainly from the School of Computing, Engineering and Intelligent Systems at Ulster University in Derry, Northern Ireland but has the potential to scale up across the University where it could be extended with deep integration from existing software systems.

The current version allows students to ask questions about the following topics, student support, the Magee campus and map, staff contact details, counselling services, course directors, location of the school office, computing labs, tutorials, Blackboard Learn support, enrolment and tuition fees information, timetabling, academic calendar, studies advice, final year projects, attendance, car parking and the student union amongst others.

How we built it

We reviewed existing student support services, material and the induction process, read associated literature, worked with colleagues across a number of departments and talked to students about the problems they faced. From this we created an initial project specification and researched viable delivery technologies on which to build and deploy the application.

The application currently uses Amazon Sumerian, Lex and Polly. The application could offer a higher level of personalisation with the use of Amazon Rekognition and Kinesis for facial recognition. This was developed and implemented but is disabled for the publicly available version.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The project comprised a small team of students led by a member of academic staff. There was no formal budget for the project and we had no previous experience of AWS or Sumerian and the related services. From this starting point we created a tool with a lot of potential to support students and improve their University experience and subsequent career prospects.

What's next for Martha, your digital friend for support at University

The application will be trialed with selected students in the School in the second semester of this academic year. New content and support material will be added and the practicalities of repurposing /integrating/pulling content from legacy University support and content management systems into the application and scaling it up across the University and deploying it on multiple devices investigated.

Challenges we ran into

The University has a lot of high-quality student support material available. However, the material resides in different data silos across multiple applications and in numerous, sometimes incompatible formats. The initial challenge was to understand the students and University’s needs, then find and review existing material, catalogue it, try to understand how the students would use the application, then re-purpose the material accordingly into bite size chunks for use in Sumerian and the AWS ecosystem using a voice user interface.

What we learned

We learnt a lot about the challenges facing students as they transition to University life and how the University tries to support this process. We also learnt about the IT infrastructure and services that supports the running of the University. In addition, we learnt about AWS and related applications e.g. Lex, Polly, Sumerian and voice services etc and their potential uses in both this application domain and others.