Challenges and Opportunities of Education in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Teacher Perception on Applying AI Chatbot for Online Language Learning

ABSTRACT

Education has been considerably hindered or interrupted as a result of restrictive regulations and the building of social distance, making it one of the major sectors of COVID-19. In the past, it was suggested that chatbots may be utilized to assist individuals in learning more independently and in a variety of virtual learning contexts. The goal of this study was to evaluate the potential hurdles posed by the COVID-19 outbreak to online learning, as well as teachers’ perspectives on the use of AI chatbots for online language learning. An online interview has been conducted with six interviewees in verifying the proposed questions from the teachers’ perspectives. The result shows that there are common themes of challenges for online learning and online teaching (1) Infrastructure;(2) Accessibility and Technology;(3) Readiness;(4) Assessment and Examinations;(5) Socioeconomic factors;(6) Mental health and personal well-being;(7) Online Security Issues and human and pet intrusions;and (8) Digital competence. The finding also indicates that the proposed technology, an AI chatbot, is anticipated to help the learning process to achieve the course’s objectives more effectively than traditional methods. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.