I’m proud to have been awarded a Comenius Teaching Fellowship, by the Netherlands Initiative for Education Research (NRO). This grant will enable me to develop and implement a series of Intercultural Chatbots, AI-based teaching tools that enhance intercultural learning.
It is undeniable that generative AI are having a profound impact on higher education. While many challenges exist, we also believe that there is great, as-of-yet unrealized, potential for using these tools for enhancing students’ intercultural competence development.
The aim of this project is to develop and validate a new teaching tool that uses Intercultural Chatbots: AI-based conversational agents that can mimic distinct cultural communication styles. These chatbots will be implemented in intercultural education at AMSIB, allowing students to gain experience in intercultural communication, and reflect on how they respond to communication styles that are different from their own. Such experiences will provide new opportunities for enhancing students’ intercultural competences
The LLM-algorithms that lie at the heart of this project have been developed with support from the Center of Economic Transformation (CET), which funded the proof-of-concept. The Comenius Teaching Fellowship will enable us to take this project to the next level, by developing the interfaces which allow us to implement the chatbots in our education program, assessing their effectiveness at enhancing intercultural learning, and disseminating our findings with other educators in the Netherlands and beyond.
The Intercultural Chatbots project is a collaboration between experts in intercultural communication, generative AI and human-machine interactions, from Amsterdam School of International Business (AMSIB), Alphacrucis University College (Sydney, Australia), Erasmus University Rotterdam, and University of Amsterdam.