FCSIT WhatsApp Chatbot

• Main Authors: KUO HONG, TEO, AHMAD KHIRI, MOHAMAD JOHAN
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: UNIMAS Publisher 2021
• Subjects: L Education (General); Q Science (General); QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
• Online Access: http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/37342/1/chatbot1.pdf; http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/37342/; https://publisher.unimas.my/ojs/index.php/TUR/issue/view/178; https://doi.org/10.33736/tur.v4i1
• Institution: Universiti Malaysia Sarawak

WhatsApp is currently one of the most widely used communication mediums among students in tertiary education in the form of both personal messages and group messaging chats. Currently, the practice in most Malaysian Universities is that students need to consult the faculty staff or search through the faculty’s website to obtain information related to their academic studies. However, the process of obtaining needed information can take some time ranging from minutes to hours and at times are not consistent as the queries are answered by different staff members. There are WhatsApp chat groups for students to interact with faculty staff, but the chat group can be overwhelmed by questions due to the huge number of group members hence causing important messages to be overlooked. In an attempt to overcome these challenges, we developed a FCSIT (Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology) WhatsApp chatbot to solve these problems by offering a centralized platform of communication for both faculty staff and students to carry out information sharing through WhatsApp messages. Communication is in the form of personalized messages between the chatbot and the user thus solving the problem of overwhelming messages posed by group chats. Agile Kanban methodology was used to develop the system which promotes the use of a Kanban board to visualize the development stages. A questionnaire was distributed to lecturers, faculty staff and students to test the system and to gather opinions and suggestions from targeted users, which is the FCSIT community, in order to assess whether the system fulfils its objectives.