| |OCTOBER 20189CIOReviewperience to prospective students and parents by leveraging bot technol-ogy which allows intelligent agents to provide answers about the institution, financial-aid, programs, accredita-tion, admissions, enrollment process and other key questions fundamen-tal for a potential student through an interactive experience.b) Tuition and Financial Aid ­ This is arguably the most decisive fac-tor for a student who wants to attend a particular college or university. Tra-ditionally, it has been made a complex and at times bureaucratic process that overcomplicates a simple answer to the student around "How much will it cost for me to attend school" and "how much financial aid can I get based on a combined family income". In addition to this hurdle, is the ability for a student to know if they are eligi-ble for a particular grant or scholar-ship. All of this makes it very difficult for a student and parents (undergrad-uate degree-seekers) to understand their options. This is compounded with the fact that students and parents are now significantly savvier when it comes to selecting and applying to a particular college.By leveraging AI through bots, institutions can deliver the answers to tuition cost, financial aid calculations, loan-type options as well as eligibility for grants and scholarships in an inter-active, fun and informative manner. These tools can be delivered via many different channels including school's web-sites, portals, microsites, mobile apps and others.c) Enrollment Process ­ Nothing will ever replace the human-touch aspect of an educational professional interacting directly with a student; es-pecially since the student has already made a conscious decision to pursue an education at a particular institu-tion and is keen on beginning the educational journey. However, there is a great op-portunity by combining the power of AI and Big-Data in ways that has never done before. Again, by leverag-ing bots that can provide the answers to common enrollment questions as well as solutions and options as data is consumed from "Data Lakes" and new answers are been fed into the repositories, institutions can provide quicker and more efficient answers to student's need and these "services" will become smarter over periods of time.d) Student Support ­ A key ser-vice organization in any college or university that is student-facing is the student support group which provides front-end user support for common academic, campus and other similar types of issues. Usually, this is broken down by Tier-1, Tier-2 and Tier-3 levels of support depending on the complexity and severity of the issue. A great opportunity exists in dis-rupting the traditional call-center model of support to students by im-plementing bots that are designed to provide quick and efficient answers 7x24x365 to students on basic issues and challenges. As the bots learn from the new questions and answers over periods of times, these can be lever-aged across campuses, programs, on-line and other student segments.e) Additional Opportunities ­ Be-sides the traditional student-centric processes, there are a number of areas that AI can directly benefit and trans-form the student's experience specially for new freshmen undergraduate gen-erations. Some of the potential oppor-tunities are:· Students can better manage their degree plan in a more intuitive and engaging way via a conversation with an AI bot and be able to make adjust-ments to their degree plan real-time and without the need to wait for an advisor and from your mobile device· AI can help research institutions process large amounts of data and sum-marize key findings faster and in a more intuitive way (example: Google analytics bot)· AI can drive dynamic learning sce-narios to make more realistic learning simulations and identify if students are bored or struggling with course content· AI can help to automate basic ac-tivities like grading· AI could help adjust the student workspace by learning how they are using an application like their school's Learning Management SystemOverall, the opportunities to begin disrupting the traditional student-sup-port and academic are enormous and will depend on institution's appetite for radical transformation by leveraging disruptive technologies such as AI in a way that can fundamentally change how a future student interacts with a college or university. Only those institutions, product/services companies, adminis-trators, educators, start-ups and tech-nology professionals that are willing to embrace the future and embrace a shift in the direction, will be able to shine and stand out from the rest of the competi-tion by delivering superior and trans-formative experiences to future student generations.
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