At the end of AI week, Provost Haggerty shared with the OSU community that in an effort to further strengthen how we engage and support students across the university will launch Beaverly, an SMS-based tool designed to connect students with timely information and support. Through text messaging, Beaverly offers OSU the opportunity to engage students differently, and to focus on both proactive outreach and responsive support.
Through student engagement with Beaverly, OSU will gather student voice data across four areas of the student experience known to be correlated with student success and retention:
- Academic Engagement
- Financial Distress
- Wellness (wellbeing)
- Engagement (belonging).
University Advising & Educational Engagement in the Office of Undergraduate Education (OUE) has been working with EdSights and university partners throughout winter and spring terms to prepare the launch of Beaverly. Implementation efforts over the last four months included:
- Building an alert structure, in cases when students may share concerning information with the chatbot
- Compiling a robust first-iteration knowledge base, based on nearly 400 of the most common questions from across EdSights universities
- Constructing a term-by-term framework of outreach questions that suggest resources to students and surface real-time insights into student challenges or difficulties
We are excited to share that Beaverly’s introductory text message went out to students on Tuesday, April 28. Following this introductory message, students received their first engagement outreach in the afternoon on Thursday, April 30. This work has been made possible by cross-divisional and cross-campus collaboration and support, and we are pleased to reach this milestone in our efforts to support student success, retention, and degree completion.
Beyond the initial text messages, Beaverly will send periodic check-ins to students throughout the remainder of spring term. These are timed to offer important and relevant resources. Beaverly is also responsive, and students can reach out any time to ask a question. Beaverly responds to inquiries on a broad range of topics specific to OSU and is trained to answer questions quickly or refer students to the people at OSU who are able to assist. It is important to remember that Beaverly is designed to complement, not replace, the work of faculty, advisors, and staff members.
While Beaverly has launched, there is still so much more that Beaverly can learn about OSU, and we need your help. As members of the OSU community, you are invited to visit the Beaverly SharePoint, where you can see and contribute to Beaverly’s knowledge base. Beaverly is not designed to hold all knowledge about OSU or walk students through nuanced or complex processes. Beaverly is designed to give students quick, factual answers or a referral to the people who can best help students. Also, its knowledge base has been designed to give answers regardless of student campus. (Proactive outreach from Beaverly is able to differentiate by student campus in a way that its responses to student inquiries are not currently able to do.)
With the rise of generative AI, questions might exist about inaccurate information offered to students by Beaverly. Beaverly draws information from a knowledge base of 400+ questions that was constructed by more than 75 people from across the Corvallis campus, OSU-Cascades, Ecampus, Academic Affairs, and Student Affairs. While Beaverly does use a large language model to make better referrals based on real language patterns, it is not designed to generate answers to student questions at the expense of accuracy. You can learn more about what Beaverly is, and is not, at the Beaverly technology page’s FAQ. More information about the vendor, EdSights, is available through this video overview.
All OSU team members with questions are encouraged to review the website, take a look at the FAQ section, and then reach out to Chris Gasser, Associate Director in University Advising & Educational Engagement. We will add FAQs as needed.
Written by Chris Gasser, Associate Director, and Carla Harcelroad, Executive Director of University Advising and Educational Engagement, Office of Undergradaute Education in the Division of Academic Affairs