This study examined the potential of pedagogical agents as learning companions (PALs) to build social relations with learners and, consequently, to motivate learning. The study investigated the impact of PAL affect (positive vs. negative vs. neutral), PAL gender (male vs. female), and learner gender (male vs. female) on learners’ social judgments, motivation, and learning in a controlled experi...

Due to the new possibilities they open up for collaborative writing in education, wikis have received much attention the last few years. As a result, teachers have used wikis to achieve various educational purposes, such as wikis for online courses, teacher evaluation, or class project. However, the novelty and popularity of a technology do not automatically imply its suitability in educational...

This study investigated the effects of a pedagogical agent that cued relevant information in a story-based instructional animation on the cardiovascular system. Based on cognitive load theory, it was expected that the experimental condition with the pedagogical agent would facilitate students to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information, and therefore lead to higher learning outco...

This paper presents findings of a pilot study which used pedagogical agents to examine disclosure in educational settings. The study used responsive evaluation to explore how use of pedagogical agents might affect students’ truthfulness and disclosure by asking them to respond to a lifestyle choices survey delivered by a webbased pedagogical agent. Findings indicate that emotional connection wi...

Feedback is a crucial element in the learning process and it can be quite challenging to provide the right feedback upon which students can act upon to improve their learning. Providing proper feedback is even more challenging in contemporary educational environments due the presence of a number of factors such as: changing expectations of students, variety of teaching modes, etc. Our objective...

This paper describes two affect-sensitive variants of an existing intelligent tutoring system called AutoTutor. The new versions of AutoTutor detect learners’ boredom, confusion, and frustration by monitoring conversational cues, gross body language, and facial features. The sensed cognitive-affective states are used to select AutoTutor’s pedagogical and motivational dialogue moves and to drive...

In this article we will develop the following hypothesis as it relates to the field of educational technology in higher education: students, teachers, and educational institutions are all concerned with a common underlying “learning model.” The organization of these various levels (students, teachers, institutions) around learning may be considered as a guide and as a sign of an expected educat...

Since 1996 the Communication Studies programme at Roskilde University (Denmark) has been offered as distance education. During the four years, we have improved our means to achieve a functioning CSCL pedagogy, developing from initially a somewhat naïve translation of face-to-face and group organized PBL to an online context, into a now rather reflected CSCL learning concept, with intensive faci...