Provide students with a general-purpose chatbot

ASKALMA 00-002

What you need to know

Students only have access to Ask Alma if a lecturer specifically makes the service available within their FELIX course. There is therefore no general, university-wide access for all students who are not enrolled on a specific module component.
Background: The use of AI tools in teaching should be pedagogically embedded and supported. When Ask Alma is made available via a FELIX course, the lecturer can:

- explain the intended purpose (e.g. comprehension questions, exam preparation),
- address the limitations and risks of AI (errors, incompleteness, biases),
- set out clear rules for use (no personal data, no attempted academic misconduct)- and reflect on its use in the context of the respective learning objectives.

To enable your students to use the general Ask Alma chatbot in your FELIX course, you must first import Ask Alma into your course via a course component (LTI module).

What you have to do

  1. Importing Ask Alma: Under ‘Administration’, open the course editor for the relevant course and click on ‘Import course elements’ at the top.
    In the dialogue box that opens, select the ‘Search form’ tab and search for ‘Ask Alma’ in thesearch field.
    Select the “Ask Alma” entry and click “Next”.
    In the next step, enable the “Ask Alma” structural element, click “Next” twice and then click “Finish”.
    Once the import is complete, you can customise the course elements to suit your needs.
    Move it to the desired location within the course and rename it if necessary (e.g. ‘AI support’ and ‘AI assistant’).
    Tip: Leave the “Zu beachten” page, which appears before the chatbot, in place as information for your students.

    • In addition to the ‘Ask Alma’ module (‘About the chatbot’), the ‘Zu beachten’ page will also be imported into your course as an information page for your students.

  2. Publish changes: Click on the red cross (top right) to close the course editor. Select the ‘Publish automatically’ option to apply the changes to the course view. 

    • The new section will only appear in the course view once it has been published.

  3. Use by students: Your students can now click on the Ask Alma module in the course menu and start the general chat by selecting ‘Go to chatbot’.

    • During the module component, please point out:
      - the ways in which the chat function can be used effectively (e.g. questions to check understanding, explanations, examples),
      - that no personal data must be entered,
      - that no illegal, harmful or abusive content must be generated or searched for,
      - that no third-party rights must be infringed (e.g. copyright-protected texts, confidential documents),
      - that AI responses may contain errors and that students should consult you in case of uncertainty.

  4. Student credits: Please inform your students that they, too, have a monthly credit for using Ask Alma. Once this credit has been used up, the Lite version will automatically be activated until the end of the month. Ask Alma remains usable, but with restrictions (only Lite language models are available; web search, image generation and the tool for calculations and table analysis are not available; when uploading files, only documents, text, code and images are permitted – no tables or archives). At the start of the following month, the full credit will be available again. Information on your current credit is available in ‘Settings & help’ (in the menu at the bottom left), under ‘Settings’ and then in the ‘Credit’ tab at the top right.

Problems or questions?