PRE2020 4 Group7

This group is claimed by Nout Prins,

Group members are

Wouter Tulp
Nout Prins
Delorean Canlon
Rens Vogels
Benji van den brand <be>

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 education and its possibilities. These new views lead to speculation about the future of education and which parts of education could become online. Online or offline events, meetings, and lectures have their pros and cons, which makes it a decision about either offline or online activities. Some predictions go towards a hybrid form of education in the future, which features online and offline aspects(Villegas-Ch, 2021). This would mean that online education would remain a big part of the education of 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 the way they need to be used and in where their strength lies. Discord 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 integration for educational purposes. 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 do 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 is 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 figure out 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 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 positive 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 splitting students into the break-out rooms

Calling a teacher to one of the break-out rooms

Creating polls to quickly get 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

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 tue 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 tue 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.

Week 1

Name	Student ID	Hours worked	Tasks done
Rens Vogels	1378384	2	Meeting(2h)
Nout Prins	0917546	2	Meeting(2h)
Delorean Canlon	1225364	2	Meeting(2h)
Wouter Tulp	1325833	2	Meeting(2h)
Benji van den Brand	1328255	2	Meeting(2h)