IMPLEMENTATION AND EVALUATION OF A CHATBOT IN A BUSINESS COURSE IN HIGHER EDUCATION.

While the higher education sector is continuously searching for innovative technologies, the use of chatbots requires extensive research and careful consideration of their pedagogical value. The lessons learned from lecturers who experiment with chatbots can constitute important evidence to support their use. This paper presents a chatbot specifically designed for a Higher Education course, named RESOURCEbot, its mechanics and workflows. This chatbot was used in a university course to assist the students with recommendations of relevant research papers. It is also presented the chatbot's evaluation. The evaluation of the RESOURCEbot derived from a questionnaire that was distributed among the students to assess their opinions about the experience of using a chatbot, its performance and their intention to use chatbots in educational settings. The results highlighted some of RESOURCEbot's limitations, such as some difficulty in understanding the students' prompts, but overall they reflected the students' positive opinions concerning its ease of use, and the value and pertinence of its recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]