Facing a Failing Manual E-Ticketing System, Nigeria's National Open University Builds an AI Chatbot for Student Complaints

The National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) is the country's main open and distance-learning institution, with about 500,000 enrolled students as of its 2024 admission records who rely on a ticketing system to raise academic and administrative complaints because most never set foot on a campus.
Researchers from NOUN and Cardiff Metropolitan University's Cardiff School of Technologies first documented the problem: the existing e-ticketing system was operated manually, producing delayed responses and, in many cases, inadequate resolutions — a pattern the study links to student frustration and attrition risk in open and distance learning.
To address it, the team built an AI chatbot using the open-source ChatterBot framework in Python, backed by SQLite and served through a Flask web interface, designed to answer routine student queries automatically and route complex cases onward. They evaluated it through an online survey sent to 2,000 NOUN students; 579 responded, a 29% response rate, and of those, 370 (64%) rated the chatbot 'extremely helpful' in resolving their issues and complaints.
The reliance on a self-selected 29% survey response is a real limitation: it measures self-reported satisfaction among students motivated enough to complete a questionnaire, not independently verified ticket-resolution times or attrition data, and the paper does not report a full production rollout beyond the evaluation. The honest reading is a promising early-stage fix for a documented, concrete administrative failure, not yet a proven university-wide system.

Read the full analysis: https://pure.cardiffmet.ac.uk/en/publications/a-chatbot-student-support-system-in-open-and-distance-learning-in/