Students spend most of their time on mobile instant messaging applications (“MIM apps”), which are often preferred to several desktop/computer apps (Schmulian & Coetzee 2018; Tang & Hew 2022). Instead of forcing students to use desktop and computer platforms, teaching and learning may be more accessible to students when supplementing the teaching and learning process with MIM apps (see also commentary of Nee et al 2023). This was most noticeable during the COVID-19 lockdown periods in 2020 and 2021, when engaging with students through MIM apps, such as WhatsApp and Telegram, provided greater engagement and accessibility (see Harry 2023; Nee et al 2023). In this regard, Schmulian & Coetzee (2018:2) argue that MIM apps have many benefits: Ibijola 2020), and the Lecturer’s Apprentice (Ismail & Ade-ibijola, 2019). Further to this, the use of chatbots in facilitating the teaching and learning experience has also seen an increase in recent years (see, for example, https://botsify.com/chatbotfor-education and more recently ChatGPT has provided another advanced layer to automated and interactive engagement with content). Given these existing works, we can say chatbots have gained some popularity as a support tool in teaching and learning. Although the use of chatbots is not something new, it is rather novel in the teaching and learning of the law and has not previously been utilised in the Faculty of Law at UJ. It is against this background that the concept was developed to incorporate a chatbot in the Law of Contract module to support learning, which came to be known as the “LawBot Project”. Affordances of MIM apps such as flexible use, continuity of use, timely feedback, personalization, socialization, active participation, peer coaching, and self-evaluation promote opportunities for social constructivist-based collaborative learning, through enabling productive conversation and collaboration between the student and knowledgeable others, including their instructors and fellow students. However, the use of MIM apps has its limitations (see further discussion of these shortcomings in Tang & Hew 2022), and this is particularly prevalent when considering the large class sizes that may limit a teacher’s ability to engage meaningfully with students on an individual basis when using MIM apps in the traditional manner (Schmulian & Coetzee 2018). Such large class sizes is exactly the challenge faced in the Law of Contract module, a third-year module with approximately 400 students in the Faculty of Law at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). Conceptually, these limitations may be overcome by automating responses, thereby elevating a MIM app to incorporate the functionality of messenger bots (or chatbots) to provide instant, automated and “on-demand” assistance to student queries regarding the work and the module’s material (Nee et al 2023; Schmulian & Coetzee 2018). The idea behind chatbots is to facilitate not only automated but also the personalised resolution of queries and permit for streamlined and personalised engagements with students (see Baskara 2023; Harry 2023). Such interaction can be done through text, voice or even video which, depending on the sophistication of the underlying algorithms of the platform, is intended to mimic human interaction (Schmulian & Coetzee 2018). The use of chatbots in the education sector is not something new (Okonkwo & Ade-Ibijola, 2021). For instance, UJ has already employed such chatbots, firstly for prospective and existing student engagements on its main website (www. uj.ac.za), as well as IT-related staff queries with the use of the Robbie 2.0 application on the MS Teams platform. Similar projects at UJ over the last few years include the Python-Bot, a chatbot for teaching computer programming (Okonkwo & AdeTeaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching Innovation Projects 2022 81
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