Chatbots have become a popular, cost-efficient solution that introduces automatization to a business wherever possible.
The potential of chatbots is vast, from answering inquiries and managing bookings to improving customer experience and lowering business costs.
While it makes perfect sense to sign up for a course about developing one, knowing how to distinguish between a quality course and a flawed one will save you a lot of time, helping you develop better chatbots for your business.
Therefore, before choosing which chatbot development course to buy, this is what you should consider.
The platform
When buying an online course, the first thing you should consider is the legitimacy of the platform offering you the course.
By legitimacy, we mean that the platform’s instructors are credible specialists with industry-backed knowledge, and that the platform will deliver a high-quality course experience it promised.
There are several things you can do to check if the platform is legit:
- Make sure you’re using “https://” or a secure server internet connection so other web users can’t spy on your personal details, such as your banking info. If a website requires login details without taking you to an “https://” connection, leave it right away.
- Inspect the platform’s details for obvious grammatical errors and faulty spelling.
- Mind the content because legitimate platforms spend time to offer authentic, quality content, stock photos for quickly built websites.
- Find out who owns the domain. Knowing who owns the platform helps you identify if the website is a place of a genuine business. You can check domain ownership using the free ICANN Lookup tool.
After you’ve established the legitimacy of the platform, you can move on to other checkpoints for course quality assurance.
The instructor
The quality of a Chatbot development course depends on the instructor’s work experience and teaching abilities.
If the instructor is an established industry-known name, it’s safe to assume his course is worthwhile and insightful.
When evaluating the course instructor, you should:
- Examine their bio on the course. It should include their relevant work experience, the number of students that have taken the course, and the courses he has available.
- Read user reviews that discuss their experiences with the course and check if they are satisfied with the skills they’ve acquired.
- Search the instructor on LinkedIn to see his or her past projects, industry experience, and establish his authority in chatbot development.
Finally, having contact possibilities for a Q&A with the instructor is beneficial because they can directly address any of your questions regarding the course, such as the difficulty level and learning methods.
Time of last update
Like with any rapidly growing technology, chatbot development trends change often.
If the content of the course is outdated, the chatbot you’ll end up developing won’t be able to meet your client’s needs in full.
It will fail customer expectations and reflect poorly on your customer service.
A case study by Springer has found that rule-based chatbots fail to achieve a human-like connection with customers and perform lesser than AI-based chatbots.
If the course program hasn’t updated its machine learning lessons in a long time, you’ll miss out on learning a rising trend in chatbot development.
Every chatbot course page should explicitly tell when the last update happened. If that information is lacking, you shouldn’t be shy to ask that question directly to the instructor.
The course overview
The overview is the most commonly examined criteria when selecting an online course.
Knowing what to look for in a course overview makes it easier to identify good courses on chatbot development from low-quality ones.
A good course overview should do two things.
First, it should inform you about the content of the course and the general information about it. This includes:
- the difficulty level
- course duration
- the number of lessons
- which technologies you will cover
- what tools you will use
- what resources will the course provide
Secondly, it should show you how the content is organized in an outline.
A course outline is like a design plan that reveals the structure of the course and the steps of its development. It should include outcome goals—however, that point will be addressed separately.
Knowing how to recognize a strong course structure helps identify excellent online courses from sub-par learning experiences.
From observing the course structure, you can feel confident about the benefits you’re getting from picking a quality course on chatbot development.
A clear goal
The outcome goal is the reason you pick the course.
It should specify the measurable outcomes of the course and the skills you will have attained by completing it.
When considering a chatbot development course, pay special attention to clearly presented goals of the outcome.
They should include measurable outcomes and what you can expect to learn when you complete the course.
When the goals are presented in a cohesive way, you are able to compare what you would get from different courses and enables you to pick the one that benefits you the most.
High-quality courses often offer a certificate of completion to their attendees.
Conclusion
In this blog post, we’ve discussed the most important things you sound consider before purchasing a course on developing chatbots.
If the course you’re interested in comes from a legitimate platform, meets all the criteria mentioned above, and has a great course structure, mastering its content will help you attain new skills.
As a result, you will expand your AI programming abilities even further.