Like most curricula in the humanities and social sciences, the curriculum of pre-service teacher training in educational sciences often includes time-consuming reading and writing tasks, which require high quality support and feedback in a timely manner. A well-known way to provide this support to students is one-to-one mentoring. However, limited time and resources in the German university context require to effectively scale the benefits of individual feedback. The use of scalable technologies to support learning processes seems to be promising, but its development usually requires a deep technical understanding. With an interdisciplinary approach, this contribution investigates how personal mentoring can be made available to as many students as possible, taking into account the didactic, organizational and technical frameworks at universities. We describe the development and implementation process of two chatbots that both aim to support students of educational sciences in their self-study of the seminar topics and literature. The chatbots were used by over 700 students during the course of 1 year and our evaluations show promising results that bear the potential to improve the availability of digital mentoring support for all students.

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In addition to formal learning at universities, like in lecture halls and seminar rooms, students are regularly confronted with self-study activities. Instead of being left to their own devices, students might benefit from a proper design of such activities, including pedagogical interventions. Such designs can increase the degree of activity and the contribution of self-study activities to the achievement of learning outcomes. Especially in times of a global pandemic, self-study activities are increasingly executed at home, where students already use technology-enhanced materials, processes, and digital platforms. Thus we pick up these building blocks and introduce TecCoBot within this paper. TecCoBot is not only a chatbot, supporting students in reading texts by offering writing assignments and providing automated feedback on these, but also implements a design for self-study activities, typically only offered to a few students as face-to-face mentoring.

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