Virtual Worlds in Education - A systematic Literature Review

Virtual worlds (VWs) are no novum in higher education but regain interest through COVID-19 restrictions, emerging technologies, and the metaverse hype. Therefore, we conduct a systematic literature review to gain the current status quo of research in higher and further education to identify the educational activities, research areas, learning environments, technologies towards the metaverse, subjects taught, and the current state of design knowledge. The initially found 587 records were systematically filtered to 89 fully coded articles. Based on our results, we define research gaps and derive research streams. Our results reveal a lack of research on social integration, course design, non-technical target groups, theoretical grounding and general design knowledge within the given context. The metaverse trend has reached educational research in the way that from 2016 onwards, new technologies are investigated selectively for educational purposes

Needs of Students in Further Education – A Mixed Methods Study

Technological progress and volatile working environments inevitably lead to the need for lifelong learning. Learners in continuing education pursuing a professional career are therefore increasingly turning to accompanying continuing education formats (OECD, 2021). In this context, the terms “further or continuing education” describe the deepening, broadening, or update of existing vocational education and training from a previous phase of education. Less time available for studying due to having a job and possibly a family leads to either lower grades or longer completion times (Hall, 2010) or even higher dropout rates (Hoffmann, Thalhammer, von Hippel, & Schmidt-Hertha, 2020). Furthermore, secondary education might date back long ago (Hanft, Maschwitz, & Hartmann-Bischoff, 2013). Digital transformation drives the expectation for digital, scalable, and affordable solutions that are adaptive to this target group’s heterogeneous needs and challenges independent of time and location (Marković, 2014). However, before user-oriented solutions can be developed, their underlying needs must be uncovered. ... [Aus: Introduction

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

A Literature Review on Pedagogical Conversational Agent Adaptation

Conversational agents (CAs)—software systems emulating conversations with humans through natural language—have been widely used to communicate and collaborate with humans in various settings. A rising application domain is education since so-called Pedagogical Conversational Agents (PCAs) hold the potential for individualized learning and thus the long-term improvement of learning success. However, existing research on CA adaptation is scattered across different application domains and user groups, so researchers face difficulty in understanding the current state of the art on the adaptation design of PCAs as an independent field of interest. To address this gap, we systematically analyze existing scientific literature and discuss identified adaptation aspects of PCAs in scientific publications. Our literature review contributes to IS research by providing an overview of existing adaptive and adaptable PCA designs, identified gaps, and future research streams with the rising potential thereupon

Needs of Students in Further Education – A Mixed Methods Study

Technological progress and volatile working environments inevitably lead to the need for lifelong learning. Learners in continuing education pursuing a professional career are therefore increasingly turning to accompanying continuing education formats (OECD, 2021). In this context, the terms “further or continuing education” describe the deepening, broadening, or update of existing vocational education and training from a previous phase of education. Less time available for studying due to having a job and possibly a family leads to either lower grades or longer completion times (Hall, 2010) or even higher dropout rates (Hoffmann, Thalhammer, von Hippel, & Schmidt-Hertha, 2020). Furthermore, secondary education might date back long ago (Hanft, Maschwitz, & Hartmann-Bischoff, 2013). Digital transformation drives the expectation for digital, scalable, and affordable solutions that are adaptive to this target group’s heterogeneous needs and challenges independent of time and location (Marković, 2014). However, before user-oriented solutions can be developed, their underlying needs must be uncovered. ... [Aus: Introduction

Needs of Students in Further Education – A Mixed Methods Study

Technological progress and volatile working environments inevitably lead to the need for lifelong learning. Learners in continuing education pursuing a professional career are therefore increasingly turning to accompanying continuing education formats (OECD, 2021). In this context, the terms “further or continuing education” describe the deepening, broadening, or update of existing vocational education and training from a previous phase of education. Less time available for studying due to having a job and possibly a family leads to either lower grades or longer completion times (Hall, 2010) or even higher dropout rates (Hoffmann, Thalhammer, von Hippel, & Schmidt-Hertha, 2020). Furthermore, secondary education might date back long ago (Hanft, Maschwitz, & Hartmann-Bischoff, 2013). Digital transformation drives the expectation for digital, scalable, and affordable solutions that are adaptive to this target group’s heterogeneous needs and challenges independent of time and location (Marković, 2014). However, before user-oriented solutions can be developed, their underlying needs must be uncovered. ... [Aus: Introduction