The Virginia Community College System realized its vision of 24/7 student support through Gideon Taylor’s Ida chatbot. Leveraging cutting-edge AI technology from Oracle, they designed a one-of-a-kind federated chatbot that can access student records, transfer to live agents, and use personalized attributes to provide answers. The 23 colleges in the system benefit from cutting edge tools like GPT4 to ensure accurate answers at a $1 per user price.
The project stands out because one platform serves 23 federated deployments which blends the cost efficiency of scale with the autonomy the colleges demand. The end result is making cutting edge AI accessible to a community college system. Each college’s bot responds to their specific population while also allowing centralized support to scale up tools within the bot and improve the bot’s accuracy and functionality including real-time secure access to student records.
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Students need support and answers in seasonal bursts, after business hours and in multiple languages. This is a tall order for human-based helpdesks, but AI is well suited for the job. AI technology can provide affordable and accessible services for community colleges that traditionally were outpriced and understaffed, allowing them the opportunity to implement such technology. VCCS has reported phone volume is down 40% and email volume is down 60%, leaving student support staff enough time to help those with more complex issues.
Institutions can leverage this model for future projects involving AI technology, understanding that through change management these types of tools are within the reach of nearly every community college.
According to Holly Whistler, the Online Virginia NetWork Coordinator for VCCS,
“This project was not without challenges, but having a truly equitable partnership between academic, technical, and strategic team members led us to be under budget and on time.”