A Longitudinal Study on Boosting Students’ Performance with a Learning Companion

This study examines the impact of a coded virtual learning companion (LC) that interacts with students of an introductory information systems class throughout the semester. The LC is designed to motivate, advise on time management strategies, and study collaboratively. We conducted a between-subject longitudinal field experiment to investigate the LC’s impact on student motivation, time management, and learning outcomes. Statistical analysis, including a PLS-SEM model, shows that the LC significantly (p \u3c 0.05) improves extrinsic motivation, challenge, short-term planning, and time attitudes. A multiple mediator analysis confirms the role of motivation and time management as mediators between LC use and learning outcomes (subjective knowledge and exam scores). In addition, we conducted a qualitative workshop with the target group to identify barriers to LC adoption and derive mitigation strategies. Overall, our study reveals great potential to facilitate learning with LCs in higher education

Conversational Agents in Education – A Systematic Literature Review

Conversational Agents (CAs) are widely spread in a variety of domains, such as health and customer service. There is a recent trend of increasing publications and implementations of CAs in education. We conduct a systematic literature review to identify common methodologies, pedagogical CA roles, addressed target groups, the technologies and theories behind, as well as human-like design aspects. The initially found 3329 records were systematically reduced to 252 fully coded articles. Based on the analysis of the codings, we derive further research streams. Our results reveal a research gap for long-term studies on the use of CAs in education, and there is insufficient holistic design knowledge for pedagogical CAs. Moreover, target groups other than academic students are rarely considered. We condense our findings in a morphological box and conclude that pedagogical CAs have not yet reached their full potential of long-term practical application in education

Engaging Learners in Online Video Lectures with Dynamically Scaffolding Conversational Agents

Online education creates new opportunities for learners, which has led to sharply increasing enrollment in the last few years. Despite these benefits, past research shows that the lack of individual interaction with educators creates low learner engagement that leads to high attrition rates, which remains a major challenge in the field. Dynamically scaffolding conversational agents built into online video lectures promise to address this problem by individually interacting with learners, similar to educators’ scaf-folding behavior. These agents are equipped with recent natural language processing capabilities, cre-ating human-like conversations that help learners to be more engaged in the learning process. To test our hypothesis, we built a dynamically scaffolding conversational agent named Sara and compared it with an often-implemented static conversational agent built into two online video lectures. We deployed a lab experiment with 182 learners. The neurophysiological measurements revealed that Sara signifi-cantly improved learner engagement partly explained by differences in learners’ perceptions in the way they experienced the interaction. This study connects to already existing conversational agent studies in online education and highlights the importance of including dynamically scaffolding conversational agents in online video lectures to address the problem of low learner engagement in online education