Design and Evaluation of an Educational Virtual Agent Based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation for the Entrepreneurship Culture Course in Higher Education

The digital transformation of higher education has driven the incorporation of intelligent systems aimed at academic support and competency development, particularly in courses related to entrepreneurial training. In this context, this article aims to design and evaluate a prototype of an AI-based educational virtual agent built upon a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture, intended to support the learning process in the Entrepreneurial Culture course. The prototype was designed and developed using an Agile methodology based on SCRUM, enabling an iterative and incremental construction process centered on the pedagogical and technological requirements of the institutional context. The virtual agent was implemented in a web environment and integrates semantic retrieval mechanisms, natural language generation, and contextual knowledge management to provide personalized guidance in business plan development and academic inquiry resolution. To evaluate the prototype’s quality, black-box functional testing and the System Usability Scale (SUS) were applied in accordance with the criteria established in the ISO/IEC 25010 standard. This analysis enabled assessment of the system’s performance in terms of usability, functionality, efficiency, and reliability from the end-user perspective. The results indicate an average SUS score of 72.96, reflecting an acceptable level of usability according to international software quality standards for educational systems.