Collaborative trails in e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on collaboration within groups of learners, and hence collaborative trails. We begin by reviewing the theoretical background to collaborative learning and looking at the kinds of support that computers can give to groups of learners working collaboratively, and then look more deeply at some of the issues in designing environments to support collaborative learning trails and at tools and techniques, including collaborative filtering, that can be used for analysing collaborative trails. We then review the state-of-the-art in supporting collaborative learning in three different areas – experimental academic systems, systems using mobile technology (which are also generally academic), and commercially available systems. The final part of the deliverable presents three scenarios that show where technology that supports groups working collaboratively and producing collaborative trails may be heading in the near future

Level-Up your Learning – Introducing a Framework for Gamified Educational Conversational Agents

Driven by circumstances like the global pandemic many learners and educators realize the importance and value of self-regulated digital learning. To better support self-regulated learning, conversational agents have become more relevant. Conversational agents can act as tutor or as learning mate for learners. Although conversational agents have potential to better support self-regulated learning processes, challenges exist requiring implications about how to make these interactions more engaging and supportive. This study discusses the value of gamified conversational learning chatbots that use game elements to engage learners to guide researchers and practitioners to design conversational agents that effectively motivate learners and provide self-regulated learning at the same time. Therefore, we propose a systematically developed framework for gamifying educational conversational agents and contribute to theory by consolidating several theories about games, digital learning, and conversational agents and support practitioners by providing implications about what to care about when gamifying conversational agents

Supporting peer interaction in online learning environments

This paper reports two studies into the efficacy of sentence openers to foster online peer-to-peer interaction. Sentence openers are pre-defined ways to start an utterance that are implemented in communication facilities as menu’s or buttons. In the first study, typical opening phrases were derived from naturally occurring online dialogues. The resulting set of sentence openers was implemented in a semi-structured chat tool that allowed students to compose messages in a freetext area or via sentence openers. In the second study, this tool was used to explore the students’ appreciation and unprompted use of sentence openers. Results indicate that students hardly used sentence openers and were skeptical of their usefulness. Because both measures were negatively correlated with students’ prior chat experience, optional use of sentence openers may not be the best way to support students’ online interaction. Based on these findings, alternative ways of using sentence openers are discussed and topics for further research are advanced

The Last Decade of HCI Research on Children and Voice-based Conversational Agents

Voice-based Conversational Agents (CAs) are increasingly being used by children. Through a review of 38 research papers, this work maps trends, themes, and methods of empirical research on children and CAs in HCI research over the last decade. A thematic analysis of the research found that work in this domain focuses on seven key topics: ascribing human-like qualities to CAs, CAs’ support of children’s learning, the use and role of CAs in the home and family context, CAs’ support of children’s play, children’s storytelling with CA, issues concerning the collection of information revealed by CAs, and CAs designed for children with differing abilities. Based on our findings, we identify the needs to account for children's intersectional identities and linguistic and cultural diversity and theories from multiple disciples in the design of CAs, develop heuristics for child-centric interaction with CAs, to investigate implications of CAs on social cognition and interpersonal relationships, and to examine and design for multi-party interactions with CAs for different domains and contexts

Building Artificially Intelligent Learning Games

The idea of digital game-based learning (DGBL) is gaining acceptance among researchers, game designers, educators, parents, and students alike. Building new educational games that meet educational goals without sacrificing what makes games engaging remains largely unrealized, however. If we are to build the next generation of learning games, we must recognize that while digital games might be new, the theory and technologies we need to create DGBL has been evolving in multiple disciplines for the last 30 years. This chapter will describe an approach, based on theories and technologies in education, instructional design, artificial intelligence, and cognitive psychology, that will help us build intelligent learning games (ILGs)

AI literacy in K‑12: a systematic literature review

The successful irruption of AI-based technology in our daily lives has led to a growing educational, social, and political interest in training citizens in AI. Education systems now need to train students at the K-12 level to live in a society where they must interact with AI. Thus, AI literacy is a pedagogical and cognitive challenge at the K-12 level. This study aimed to understand how AI is being integrated into K-12 education worldwide. We conducted a search process following the systematic literature review method using Scopus. 179 documents were reviewed, and two broad groups of AI literacy approaches were identified, namely learning experience and theoretical perspective. The first group covered experiences in learning technical, conceptual and applied skills in a particular domain of interest. The second group revealed that significant efforts are being made to design models that frame AI literacy proposals. There were hardly any experiences that assessed whether students understood AI concepts after the learning experience. Little attention has been paid to the undesirable consequences of an indiscriminate and insufficiently thought-out application of AI. A competency framework is required to guide the didactic proposals designed by educational institutions and define a curriculum reflecting the sequence and academic continuity, which should be modular, personalized and adjusted to the conditions of the schools. Finally, AI literacy can be leveraged to enhance the learning of disciplinary core subjects by integrating AI into the teaching process of those subjects, provided the curriculum is co-designed with teachersThis work has partially been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (PID2021-123152OB-C21), and the Consellería de Educación, Universidade e Formación Profesional (accreditation 2019–2022 ED431C2022/19 and reference competitive group, ED431G2019/04) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), which acknowledges the CiTIUS— Centro Singular de Investigación en Tecnoloxías Intelixentes da Universidade de Santiago de Compostela as a Research Center of the Galician University System. This work also received support from the Educational Knowledge Transfer (EKT), the Erasmus + project (reference number 612414-EPP-1-2019-1- ES-EPPKA2-KA) and the Knowledge Alliances call (Call EAC/A03/2018)S

AI in Learning: Designing the Future

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is predicted to radically change teaching and learning in both schools and industry causing radical disruption of work. AI can support well-being initiatives and lifelong learning but educational institutions and companies need to take the changing technology into account. Moving towards AI supported by digital tools requires a dramatic shift in the concept of learning, expertise and the businesses built off of it. Based on the latest research on AI and how it is changing learning and education, this book will focus on the enormous opportunities to expand educational settings with AI for learning in and beyond the traditional classroom. This open access book also introduces ethical challenges related to learning and education, while connecting human learning and machine learning. This book will be of use to a variety of readers, including researchers, AI users, companies and policy makers