Emotional Interaction in e-Learning

Emotional contact is an important element in learning since it can relieve students from failure and offer them a sense of continuous support when facing negative emotions during the learning procedure. While in traditional classes educators have the ability to inspire students and create motives that can enhance the learning process, in e-learning applications the absence of face-to-face contact eliminates emotional communication. This lack of communication can act as an obstacle between the student and the learning environment. Students spend increasingly more learning time in front of their computer: for example, results from the eUSER European project reveal that 76% of adult students use the Internet in the course of organized learning activities, and that every second person taking an e-learning course reports that they would not have done it if it had not been available online (Punie et al. 2006). E-learning applications that exploit social and emotional aspects might therefore improve the quality of education for those distance learners. In order to support the emotional process in human–computer communication, we propose the use of an agent that is represented by a graphical animated synthetic character. The agent uses expressions, gestures, and body movements to communicate with students by “talking” to them through oral and written language, expressing sympathy and comfort when they have a certain problem in the educational process.