A Digital Study Assistant for Hierarchical Goal Setting Companion Faces the First Real Users

Digital Study Assistants (DSA) are an emerging type of software that combines web-based software architectures, various data sources, and algorithms from artificial intelligence (AI) to assist learners in improving their learning-related behaviors. In this paper, we summarize the implementation and results of a field study with a DSA for hierarchical goal-setting (HGS) at the Bremen, Hannover, and Osnabrück universities from November 2021 to April 2022. The results show that 70% of students in the sample chose to get digital assistance for educational goal-setting, which is the highest interest rate among the nine assistance functions available. Of the 290 students who chose to use the assistant, only 10 completed the full assistive intervention, which equals only 3.4%. We conclude that we should improve the usability and user experience and reduce the interaction costs of the intervention.