An Autonomous Discord Bot to Improve Online Course Experience and Engagement: Lessons Learned Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed many educational institutions to adopt online learning models for most or all of their courses. As a result, the effectiveness of remote learning is more important now than ever before. In this paper, we report on work that was conducted in the Spring of 2021 at Utah Valley University. We explored the use of Discord as a delivery mechanism for online course content during the 2020-2021 school year. We also developed a Discord bot to autonomously track attendance. Based on our experience to date, the Discord bot appears to enhance remote learning. We describe the design, implementation, and deployment of our bot. We also discuss what worked well, as well as areas for improvement. In future semesters we plan to collect data by which we may begin to answer fundamental questions about the impact of such bots on remote learning.