Tufts University Student Services is piloting an Artificial Intelligence chatbot, known as Ellie, that will assist students in accessing resources and services, including financial aid, residential life information and student record materials.
Ellie, which is powered through CollegeVine’s AI One Stop platform, will be accessible to both undergraduate and graduate students from the School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Engineering, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and The Fletcher School.
Michael Hemment, the senior director of library technology and faculty information systems at Tufts, explained that Ellie is being trained on official university websites and calendars and being tailored to answer university-specific questions.
“Rather than deploying a general-purpose chatbot and asking it to answer anything, we are working with Student Services on a purpose-built AI service that has a defined set of information, clear boundaries, and human oversight,” he wrote in a statement to the Daily.
“An important part of the implementation is that Ellie has been grounded in Tufts information rather than simply being released as an open-ended AI chatbot,” he added.
According to JoAnn Jack, associate dean for student administrative services at Tufts, the purpose of building and implementing Ellie is to increase students’ access to information and resources.
Ellie is available 24/7 and can pull information from across Tufts’ various websites. Students can ask Ellie questions any time of day without having to wait hours or days for a response.
While Ellie might be able to produce responses to popular questions quickly, Jack concedes that Ellie is AI and therefore may still make some mistakes.
“Ellie, like any form of generative AI, has the potential to misunderstand a question, provide incomplete information or occasionally be wrong. Ellie also cannot currently look at an individual’s student record,” she wrote.
She acknowledges that although AI has the potential to be a beneficial tool for identifying deadlines or locating a form, humans should still be the go-to source for more in-depth, accurate information and nuanced cases.
Dr. Karen Panetta, dean of graduate education in the School of Engineering at Tufts, says Ellie could be implemented in the School of Engineering to give students information on a range of topics, from program requirements to career development.
“There’s so many really impactful services. I call them hidden gems,” she said. “The list is so deep and broad, you only want to know about it when you need it, so when you need it, you’re like ‘How do I find it again?’”
Carlos Schober, a junior majoring in computer science and a teaching assistant for Programming Languages, has already seen AI implemented in educational services.
According to him, one computer science class has started using a student-built AI teaching assistant to help students work through specific concepts and problems taught in the class.
“My networks class rolled out its own AI for that purpose,” Schober said. “It’s specifically trained on the spec for every week, and so in that sense, it can actually be more helpful than these AIs that are trained on much more broader scopes.”
“It knows how to point out reference code that the instructor has provided it ... [because] unlike ChatGPT, which is trained on everything, this thing is being trained specifically on course material.”
Schober felt that the AI teaching assistant is valuable when students have questions and TAs aren’t around, but it may also make it too easy to ask AI for help immediately instead of struggling with the problem first.
“At least with human TAs, people oftentimes don’t want to bother them too much, so they’ll go out of their way to try and solve a problem, and only once it’s really come to a dead end, they’ll seek help,” he said. “Whereas with AIs like this, people are more willing to resort to using them.”
Junior Esha Wanzakhade, a mechanical engineering student, says several of her engineering professors agree that AI can be a helpful learning tool but should not be used to complete assignments that would otherwise foster critical thinking and creativity.
“Across the board, I do believe a lot of the professors I have now believe that AI can be helpful for learning, but it also can be a hindrance to your learning in the sense that they don’t want students immediately referring to generative AI when doing a problem set and not using their own brains to think,” she said.
Ellie is another piece of the puzzle to understanding where and how to use AI in universities. In an ever-evolving world of new technology, Panetta is optimistic about AI’s applications and reiterated the importance of being flexible.
“In order for us to change the world, we have to be willing to embrace things that we’re uncomfortable with,” she said.
