Chatbot-facilitated Nursing Education: Incorporating a Knowledge-based Chatbot System into a Nursing Training Program

Conventional nursing courses have solely adopted lecture-based instruction for knowledge delivery, which tends to lack interaction, rehearsal, and personalized feedback. The development of chatbot technologies and their broad application have provided an opportunity to solve the abovementioned problems. Some knowledge-based chatbot systems have been developed; however, it is still a challenging issue for researchers to determine exactly how to effectively apply these chatbot technologies in nursing training courses. Intending to explore the application mode of chatbot technologies and their effectiveness in nursing education, this study integrated a knowledge-based chatbot system into the teaching activities of a physical examination course, using smartphones as the learning devices, and guiding students to practice their anatomy knowledge in addition to analyzing their learning efficacy and pleasure. A quasi-experiment was conducted by recruiting two classes of university students with nursing majors. One class was the experimental group learning with the knowledge-based chatbot system, while the other class was the control group learning with the traditional instruction. Based on the experimental results, the knowledge-based chatbot system effectively enhanced students’ academic performance, critical thinking, and learning satisfaction. The results indicate that the application of chatbots has great potential in nursing education.