University of Adelaide claims top education technology project

The University of Adelaide has created a world-first chatbot that helps prospective international students from over 228 countries quickly determine their eligibility to study at the university.

The International Eligibility Assessment digital assistant is based on a full Oracle stack, comprising Oracle Digital Assistant and a number of cloud services.

It’s able to offer a series of simple questions tailored to each student’s home country to pre-assess suitability for entry, powered by data on each country’s academic qualifications system and language analysis to gauge English language skills.

University staff gathered the specific data required to populate the bot’s conversation flows.

It was jointly developed by the university and IT service provider Rubicon Red, and was soft-launched in June last year.

It presently validates around 100 new leads a day, of which about half prove eligible to study at the university, representing an increased volume of pre-qualified leads and delivered a scalable solution to augment the Prospect Management team’s limited resources.

The chatbot has also lowered the university’s cost to serve each potential student, helping prospect management agents that respond to inbound calls and emails by allowing them to provide a defined response by giving prospective students an insight into their eligibility, and offer further information on scholarships or other pathways based on the eligibility determination.

The chatbot can be accessed via the University’s International Student webpage or via the university’s Facebook Messenger page.

You can read more about the University of Adelaide's work alongside the other winning projects and finalists here.

Winners were announced at the iTnews Benchmark Awards 2020 gala dinner held at KPMG’s Sydney Office in Barangaroo.