Opening access to further education and training

Working in partnership with Education and Training Boards Ireland (ETBI), the national body representing the 16 ETBs, SOLAS set out to build a virtual assistant for fetchcourses.ie.

“Our plan was that SOLAS would handle the creation of technical questions and ETBI would handle course-related questions,” says Paddy Seery. “We requested quotes from several providers for a one-year pilot project, and we chose to work with IBM and SureSkills.”

Regina McNulty, Senior Software Developer at SOLAS, adds: “We looked in particular at experience; the reference chatbots that IBM and SureSkills showed us seemed technically better than those of the competition. The virtual assistants created with IBM watsonx Assistant seemed better able to engage with the user, rather than just looking for a keyword and immediately redirecting the user to a webpage.”

SOLAS and ETBI collated a list of around 30 of the most common questions, preparing ten variants of each one to reflect the different ways in which a question might be posed. SOLAS then worked with AI specialist Ludex (http://www.ludex.io/) to prepare appropriate answers to each common question, having first undertaken a training course in plain English to ensure that the answers would be understood by the widest possible audience.

“To build Dave, our fetchcourses.ie virtual assistant, we added the Q&As to Watson and then worked with Ludex to iteratively train, test, adjust, and retrain the system," says Regina McNulty. “We also looked at aspects such as the impact of the GDPR on data provided by learners.”

SureSkills and Ludex provided the skills and experience around IBM watsonx Assistant to help SOLAS train its virtual assistant. Following go-live, SureSkills is now gathering usage data and performing analysis to measure the impact of the solution.

“Working with SureSkills and Ludex really helped us to achieve a successful outcome from our IBM watsonx Assistant project,” says Paddy Seery. “We didn't have the experience or resources to handle this purely as an internal project, but with the ongoing skills transfer from SureSkills we are working towards being able to handle changes in-house.”

He adds: “We're looking forward to understanding from SureSkills whether there are any questions that we're not currently answering. In some cases, we're expecting to identify opportunities to optimise the language and navigation structure of the website itself.”

Based on its experience in this pilot project, the SOLAS team would advise other organisations with similar goals to make sure they invest appropriately in preparation. Regina McNulty comments: “With the benefit of hindsight, we would have done more upfront in terms of getting all of the questions and answers lined up before starting on the technical elements of the solution. But although the project took longer than anticipated for that reason, we're happy to have gone out with a high-quality solution that is genuinely able to help learners get the information they're looking for.”

With Dave powered by IBM watsonx Assistant providing intuitive help 24/7 to users of fetchcourses.ie, SOLAS has seen a clear reduction in support requests.

“Our team member responsible for incoming support queries has seen a 50 percent drop in volume,” says Regina McNulty. “They also note that the issues coming in are now the less straightforward ones—which suggests that IBM Watson is doing a good job of dealing with the simpler requests from users. The requests reaching us now are related to more complex issues that really require specialist support.”

In addition to smoothing the journey for website users, the new virtual assistant therefore reduces the strain on technical resources at SOLAS, keeping skilled IT staff free to focus on work that adds more value.

“The solution already seems to be having a positive impact in terms of making things easier for our technical staff and eliminating repetitive work for skilled people,” says Paddy Seery. “Strategically, that's exactly what we wanted to achieve: helping learners get the information they need while freeing up internal resources to focus on new projects.”

By making it easier for adult learners to find and apply for further education and training courses, the virtual assistant supports SOLAS' mission to maximise economic inclusion in the Irish population. As the population becomes more skilled, this should create new opportunities and attract inward investment, making the Irish economy stronger for the benefit of all citizens.

“Our pilot project is proving tremendously useful in showing us the kinds of results we can achieve with a virtual assistant,” says Paddy Seery. “We expect to go out to tender for a multi-year solution, and we've identified the potential to extend the technology to other SOLAS websites for apprenticeships and for construction skills. Ultimately, this is a great success story for using technology to punch above our weight and deliver better service to our users.”

Established in 2013, SOLAS (link resides outside of ibm.com) is an agency of the Irish Government's Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science. Working with Regional Skills managers and partners in Education and Training Boards (ETBs) throughout Ireland, SOLAS manages Further Education and Training (FET) programmes designed to help learners succeed in the labour market and thrive in society.

SureSkills (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a world leader in delivering sophisticated technology, knowledge and learning solutions. In the domain of IT services, SureSkills designs, builds and maintains solutions for its customers that enable them to tackle their most critical business initiatives. The company’s aim is to develop a long-term relationship with its clients that builds mutual trust and drives value with sustainable IT efficiencies and innovation.