PRE2020 4 Group7

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Group members

Name Student ID
Benji van den Brand 1328255
Delorean Canlon 1225364
Nout Prins 0917546
Wouter Tulp 1325833
Rens Vogels 1378384

Introduction

Due to the COVID-19 crisis, a lot of the current education was forced to be given online. This evolution in education gave views into the world of online communication and its possibilities. These new views lead to speculation about the future of learning and about which parts of education could be moved to an online environment. Online or offline events, meetings, and lectures have their pros and cons, so it is logical that discussions are held about either offline or online activities. Some predictions go towards a hybrid form of education in the future, which features both online and offline aspects (Villegas-Ch, 2021). This would mean that online education would remain a big part of the education in the future, therefore improvements in online education will be useful for now and the future.

Many different platforms can be used for online education and every platform differs in their way of usages and strengths. One example of a platform is Discord, which has 140 million monthly active users (Curry, 2021) and is a known platform for teenagers and young adults because of its use for gaming. However, Discord use is not limited to gaming and it is a platform with potential for other forms of online communication such as business meetings and online learning. Discord is an effective and practical application that can also be run on a phone if needed (Ramadhan, 2021). According to research by Wulanjani (2018), most students gave positive responses and feedback towards Discord for a virtual listening class.

In this project, this research group will try to improve the application of Discord by adding an educational bot. Discord allows the addition of custom programmed bots which can have a lot of functionalities. Bots can make certain actions that usually take a lot of time or are impossible, very easy. A Discord bot can therefore be created to help teachers with certain tasks in online education to make it easier and more effective. This creates the objective for this course, creating a Discord bot with a multitude of useful functionalities to improve the educational use of Discord.

For this Discord bot, there is a specific user group for which it is intentionally created. This group consists of students and teachers in general. The bot is created with the experience the group members have of online education at the Technical University of Eindhoven. This will be coupled with literature research to investigate what is needed for effective online education. The team hopes to create a Discord bot that is useful for most students and teachers.

The user’s needs of students and teachers are an important place to start thinking about what needs to be implemented into the Discord bot. This user group requires that the system is easy to use and creates multiple functionalities for interaction. Rehman et al. (2013) stated that according to lecturers and students, interactive aspects in lectures are very important for the understanding of the subject. Interaction is a positive factor for concentration and for rehearsing the information gained in the educational session. This information combined with the group members' experience of online education and the current limitations of Discord, gave a list of useful functionalities to implement into the Discord bot:

  • creating quizzes to test the students' knowledge;
  • creating break-out rooms and dividing the students among these break-out rooms;
  • calling a teacher to one of the break-out rooms;
  • creating polls to quickly obtain the feedback of students;
  • creating a break-timer for clarity in breaks;
  • the ability for people to raise their hands;
  • an easy way to share files with everyone;
  • having one bot, that can split up into different channels;
  • external bot control for ease of use for the teachers; and
  • the ability to mute everyone except the main speaker.


At the end of the project, the group will have four deliverables:

  • the final Discord bot;
  • a TU/e wiki page;
  • a presentation; and
  • a demo.

The final Discord bot is the final product that is delivered in this project and will become a real Discord bot available for use. While creating the Discord bot, the group will update a TU/e wiki page with information on the progress of the group and all information about the project. This wiki page will be updated weekly with the progress and information gained in that week and will be brought to a conclusion in the final week(s) of the project. To present the Discord bot to the public, a presentation is created which shows the whole project of the group. This will also include a demo that shows the use of the Discord bot in a simulated setting. Via this presentation and demo, it will be clear what the group did this project and what the final product is.


Setup

Approach

During the project the Scrum framework will be used. Scrum is a technique used in projects for small groups. Scrum meetings will be held twice a week. To keep track of the progress that has been made, a Trello board will be created. This board is updated weekly.

Scrum is about starting a project by doing it. It is not exactly known what the deliverables are at the start of the project. That is why a list of implementations has been created that the team strives for. The team will start working on the listed features and find ways to implement these features along the way.

There will be four sprints, with every sprint lasting two weeks. The sprints consist of these stages:

1. research and planning;

2. implementation stage;

3. implementation stage 2; and

4. finalising deliverables.

After every sprint, the sprint is reviewed and notes are taken for improvements during future sprints. In this way any difficulties are likely to be resolved and the project can finish smoothly.


Weekly tasks

When What Who


Week 1 Brainstorming & planning All
Week 2 * Finish SotA
* Research Discord bot
* First planning finished 		SotA (Rens, Delorean) Discord bot research (Benji)
Week 2.2 Finish: Setup environment/Setup Github, link bot token to Github. Get the bot running.
Start: Investigating how to implement functionalities 		Will be divided during the meeting.
Week 3 Investigate how to implement functionalities. Make plan on how to implement it.

Maybe even implement some already + Meeting Lambert

Will be divided during meeting
Week 3.2 Finished: Complete plan with list of implementations. and an idea of how to start
implementing those. Implemented at least 2 functionalities. 		Will be divided during meeting
Week 4 Finished 4 implementations.
Week 4.2 Finished 6 implementations.
Week 5 Finished 8 implementations.
Week 5.2 Finished all (10) implementations.
Week 6 Room for finishing touches and or delay for implementations.
Week 6.2 Room for finishing touches.
Week 7 Start with presentation + demo.
Week 7.2
Week 8 Hand in presentation + demo.
Week 9 Finishing wiki page. All

Deliverables

  • Creating quizzes to test the students' knowledge;
  • creating break-out rooms and dividing the students among these break-out rooms;
  • calling a teacher to one of the break-out rooms;
  • creating polls to quickly obtain the feedback of students;
  • creating a break-timer for clarity in breaks;
  • the ability for people to raise their hands;
  • an easy way to share files with everyone;
  • having one bot, that can split up into different channels;
  • external bot control for ease of use for the teachers; and
  • the ability to mute everyone except the main speaker.

Extra functionalities can be added to this list if time allows.

USE assessment

This project will be analyzed using the User, Society, Enterprise (USE) approach. With this method, it will be highlighted how all the separate aspects in USE relate to this project.

User

As stated in the introduction, the user group for this project consists of teachers and students. At the moment that this project is running, the COVID-19 virus crisis is currently very active in the world. Due to COVID-19 social contact is limited to decrease the chances of the virus spreading even more. This resulted in a sudden change to online education and the use of online tools to host a range of educational activities. For the user group, it is optimal if the level of education online can stay on the same level as the level of education that was standard in an offline setting. This should be achieved with as much ease of use, so no confusion can form a bridge for understanding. Following the introduction, it might be that future education will be a hybrid of online and offline methods. When this is the case, it should be that the benefits of online education are enhanced and the problems decreased.

Problems experienced by online instructors researched by Bakhmat et al. (2021)

On the right a table shows the problems of online education according to online instructors with research by Bakhmat et al.(2021). Some of the problems cannot be helped with the use of software systems. For example, internet connection and computer competency cannot be fixed with software that the team is going to create. Only some problems can be remedied. Take a look at the fact that the quality of student work dropped together with stress and motivation. According to Rehman et al. (2013), interactive aspects are important for understanding and interest of students in the information. An online platform can form easy interactive aspects like quizzes or polls about the information that will come up in the future or about the information out of the past. For teachers, it is important that making these quizzes and polls is convenient, such that they will not lose too much time doing this and can use the ones they made multiple times. For students, quizzes and polls must be user-friendly and they must be able to do them regularly to boost the student’s interest and understanding. This will result in taking in more information during educational activities, making time use more efficient and giving a higher chance of passing an exam.

State of the Art

The past decades, the advent of online communication tools have made virtual meetings more and more popular. Besides the possibility to communicate with friends or strangers over the web, it is now also possible to have formal meetings in an online setting. The last few years, universities have started to provide an increasing proportion of their education via the web to their students [1]. The effects thereof have been studied extensively, for example on increasing the motivation of students in this online learning environment [2][3]. Furthermore, research has been done on the best practices of E-learning, combining the perspectives of both academic staff members and students [4][5][6]. The current COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the transition from an offline to an online work environment, increasing the number of meetings per person with no less than 12.9 percent [7]. Luckily, the world was somewhat prepared for this virtual venture, since many online platforms, such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Discord were already available. In this project, the focus is on the Discord, an online platform originally designed as a social gaming platform. The past two years, Discord has developed itself into a multipurpose tool with education as one of its main functions [8]. Although the need for offline education is becoming a larger issue as the pandemic continues and many are eager to go back to in-person get-togethers, it is plausible that online meetings will have a larger role in our society than they had before the pandemic. Because, as the scientific world has discovered, online meetings have many advantages [9][10][11].

Challenges

Unfortunately, there are some challenges to online education as well. Teachers should for example have certain technical skills to effectively teach in online learning environments [12]. Other challenges are about the risks of cheating and plagiarism during online exams [13][14] and the reduced motivation of students [2][3]. To make online meetings as effective as possible, online platforms such as Discord require a user-friendly design and should, by design, aid teachers in motivating their students.


Approaches

Even before Corona, several approaches have been studied to improve both online teaching and online meetings.

Showing only the slides to the audience is proven to be not very effective [15]. Instead, different tools exist to help engage students during these online meetings. This can be through quizzes, polls or links to external websites. Furthermore there exist video tools focussed on user friendliness. This may help students or meeting participants who are not so familiar with online communication yet.

Another aid that can be used during online communication is automatically taking minutes. Normally in meetings there is always one person taking notes, the minute-taker [16]. This person creates a “summary” of the meeting for people who could not attend or people who want to read it once more afterwards. It takes practice before a person is capable of extracting the most important information from a conversation to add to a summary. Besides that this person must multitask as he is also participating in the meeting. This problem can be resolved using a tool not just for transcribing, but one that accurately takes minutes [17][18].

One last approach for online communication focused on online as well as face-to-face learning. This way of teaching is called the hybrid educational model [19]. Even though online education has many advantages, direct interaction with the teacher creates personal ties that positively affect motivation of students. This results in students scoring higher grades. If all education and meetings were to be moved online, a means must be created to simulate direct contact between pupils and instructors as much as possible.

Our solution

Our group has created a new tool to help businesses and schools with online communication. This tool is in the form of a Discord bot with commands that can improve the experience of online communication.

Multiple Discord bots have already been made in the past to create better working experiences. Requirements for such bots were, for example, that the bot should have a simple prefix and simple to use commands [20]. Moreover, a documentation for each command and its features must be provided. This all supports the idea that operating the bit must be as simple as possible, hence creating a better user experience. Our own Discord bot is therefore also focused on ease of use. Besides that it has many functionalities that may help the users.

Nonetheless, people should keep in mind that this is just a tool. The roles that instructors have in online teaching, for example, are even more important [21]. This is mainly due to the fact that they are best capable of motivating their students [22].

The Discord bot can still be used to make online communication interesting. It offers many possibilities to make the class or meeting interactive, thus gaining the attention of the listeners better [23][24].

Time tables

Week 1

Name Student ID Hours worked Tasks done


Benji van den Brand 1328255 2 Meeting(2h)
Delorean Canlon 1225364 2 Meeting(2h)
Nout Prins 0917546 2 Meeting(2h)
Wouter Tulp 1325833 2 Meeting(2h)
Rens Vogels 1378384 2 Meeting(2h)

Week 2

Name Student ID Hours worked Tasks done


Benji van den Brand 1328255 2 Meeting(2h)
Delorean Canlon 1225364 2 Meeting(2h)
Nout Prins 0917546 2 Meeting(2h)
Wouter Tulp 1325833 2 Meeting(2h)
Rens Vogels 1378384 2 Meeting(2h)


References

[25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33]

  1. ↑ [16] Alqahtani, A. Y., & Rajkhan, A. A. (2020). E-learning critical success factors during the covid-19 pandemic: A comprehensive analysis of e-learning managerial perspectives. Education Sciences, 10(9), 216.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 [15] Nehme, M. (2010). E-learning and students' motivation. Legal Educ. Rev., 20, 223.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 [21] Abou El-Seoud, M., Taj-Eddin, I., Seddiek, N., El-Khouly, M., & Nosseir, A. (2014). E-learning and students' motivation: A research study on the effect of e-learning on higher education. International journal of emerging technologies in learning (iJET), 9(4), 20-26.
  4. ↑ [22] Alhabeeb, A., & Rowley, J. (2018). E-learning critical success factors: Comparing perspectives from academic staff and students. Computers & Education, 127, 1-12.
  5. ↑ [23] Szpunar, K. K., Khan, N. Y., & Schacter, D. L. (2013). Interpolated memory tests reduce mind wandering and improve learning of online lectures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(16), 6313-6317.
  6. ↑ [24] Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). E-learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning. john Wiley & sons.
  7. ↑ [3] DeFilippis, E., Impink, S. M., Singell, M., Polzer, J. T., & Sadun, R. (2020). Collaborating during coronavirus: The impact of COVID-19 on the nature of work (No. w27612). National Bureau of Economic Research.
  8. ↑ [25] https://discord.com/
  9. ↑ [2] Porpiglia, F., Checcucci, E., Autorino, R., Amparore, D., Cooperberg, M. R., Ficarra, V., & Novara, G. (2020). Traditional and virtual congress meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic and the post-COVID-19 era: is it time to change the paradigm?. European Urology, 78(3), 301.
  10. ↑ [8] Vladoiu, M., & Constantinescu, Z. (2020, December). Learning During COVID-19 Pandemic: Online Education Community, Based on Discord. In 2020 19th RoEduNet Conference: Networking in Education and Research (RoEduNet) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
  11. ↑ [17] Price, M. (2020). Scientists discover upsides of virtual meetings.
  12. ↑ [6] Albrahim, F. A. (2020). Online teaching skills and competencies. Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology-TOJET, 19(1), 9-20.
  13. ↑ [1] Fuller, P., & Yu, G. (2014). Lessons learned: online teaching adventures and misadventures. Journal of Social Sciences, 10(1), 33-38.
  14. ↑ [5] Gonzalez-Gonzalez, C. S., Infante-Moro, A., & Infante-Moro, J. C. (2020). Implementation of e-proctoring in online teaching: A study about motivational factors. Sustainability, 12(8), 3488.
  15. ↑ [7] Davis, N. L., Gough, M., & Taylor, L. L. (2019). Online teaching: advantages, obstacles and tools for getting it right. Journal of Teaching in Travel & Tourism, 19(3), 256-263.
  16. ↑ [10] Gutmann, J. (2016). Taking minutes of meetings. Kogan Page Publishers.
  17. ↑ [11] Liyanagunawardena, T. R. (2019). Automatic transcription software: good enough for accessibility? A case study from built environment education. In European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN) Conference Proceedings (No. 1, pp. 388-396). European Distance and E-Learning Network.
  18. ↑ [12] McGregor, M., & Tang, J. C. (2017, February). More to meetings: challenges in using speech-based technology to support meetings. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing (pp. 2208-2220).
  19. ↑ [18] Villegas-Ch, W., Palacios-Pacheco, X., Román-Cañizares, M., & Luján-Mora, S. (2021). Analysis of Educational Data in the Current State of University Learning for the Transition to a Hybrid Education Model.
  20. ↑ [9] Axelsson, E., & Fathallah, A. (2018). Rin Tohsaka–a Discord Bot for Community Management.
  21. ↑ [4] Martin, F., Budhrani, K., Kumar, S., & Ritzhaupt, A. (2019). Award-winning faculty online teaching practices: Roles and competencies. Online Learning, 23(1), 184-205.
  22. ↑ [13] Dörnyei, Z. (2018). Motivating students and teachers. The TESOL encyclopedia of English language teaching, 1-6.
  23. ↑ [19] Ramadhan, A. (2021). Student’s Response Toward Utilizing Discord Application as an Online Learning Media in Learning Speaking at Senior High School. ISLLAC: Journal of Intensive Studies on Language, Literature, Art, and Culture, 5(1), 42-47.
  24. ↑ [20] Wulanjani, A. N. (2018, July). Discord Application: Turning a Voice Chat Application for Gamers into a Virtual Listening Class. In English Language and Literature International Conference (ELLiC) Proceedings (Vol. 2, pp. 115-119).
  25. ↑ Bakhmat, L., Babakina, O., & Belmaz, Y. (2021). Assessing online education during the COVID-19 pandemic: A survey of lecturers in Ukraine. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 1840(1). https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/1840/1/012050
  26. ↑ Curry, D. (2021, March 22). Discord Revenue and Usage Statistics (2021). Businessofapps. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/discord-statistics/
  27. ↑ Lilly, C. (2021). Working from home (WFH) statistics 2021. Finder. https://www.finder.com/uk/working-from-home-statistics
  28. ↑ Ramadhan, A., & Albaekani, A. K. (2021). STUDENT’S RESPONSE TOWARD UTILIZING DISCORD APPLICATION AS AN ONLINE LEARNING MEDIA IN LEARNING SPEAKING AT SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL. ISLLAC : Journal of Intensive Studies on Language, Literature, Art, and Culture Volume, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1088/1751-8113/44/8/085201
  29. ↑ Rehman, R., Afzal, K., & Kamran, A. (2013). Interactive lectures: A perspective of students and lecturers. Journal of Postgraduate Medical Institute, 27(2), 152–156.
  30. ↑ Villegas-Ch., W., Palacios-Pacheco, X., Roman-Cañizares, M., & Luján-Mora, S. (2021). Analysis of Educational Data in the Current State of University Learning for the Transition to a Hybrid Education Model. Applied Sciences, 11(5), 2068. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11052068
  31. ↑ Wulanjani, A. N. (2018). Discord Application:Turning a Voice Chat Application for Gamers into a Virtual Listening Class. 2nd English Language and Literature International Conference (ELLiC), 2, 115–119.
  32. ↑ Baum, S., Ma, J., & Payea, K. (2013). Education pays 2013. The College Board.
  33. ↑ Dorn, E., Hancock, B., Sarakatsannis, J., & Viruleg, E. (2020). COVID-19 and student learning in the United States: The hurt could last a lifetime. McKinsey & Company.
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