Virtual Tutor Research Articles

MeIPeAS: An Intelligent Virtual Tutor for Mexican Elementary Schoolchildren

MeIPeAS: An Intelligent Virtual Tutor for Mexican Elementary Schoolchildren

Virtual Tutor as an Assistant Technology Tool in Learning English in a School

Virtual Tutor as an Assistant Technology Tool in Learning English in a School

Enhancing sentient embodied conversational agents with machine learning

Within the area of intelligent User Interfaces, we propose what we call Sentient Embodied Conversational Agents (SECAs): virtual characters able to engage users in complex conversations and to incorporate sentient capabilities similar to the ones humans have. This paper introduces SECAs together with their architecture and a publicly available software library that facilitates their inclusion in applications –such as educational and elder-care– requiring proactive and sensitive agent behaviours. In fact, we illustrate our proposal with a virtual tutor embedded in an educational application for children. The evaluation was performed in two stages: firstly, we tested a version with basic textual processing capabilities; and secondly, we evaluated a SECA with Machine-Learning-enhanced user understanding capabilities. The results show a significant improvement in users’ perception of the agent’s understanding capability. Indeed, the Response Error Rate decreased from 22.31% to 11.46% using ML techniques. Moreover, 99.33% of the participants consider the global experience of talking with the virtual tutor with sentient capabilities to be satisfactory.

Evaluación de los resultados de implementación del modelo de tutoría virtual

La tutoría actualmente se ha convertido en un referente importante dentro del modelo de universidades tecnológicas. Esto debido a que se considera una estrategia efectiva para mejorar el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje y, por extensión, para disminuir los índices de reprobación y deserción, así como incrementar la eficiencia terminal. En la Universidad Tecnológica de Tecámac (Uttec) el modelo de tutoría virtual se ha desarrollado con el fin de contribuir de manera significativa en el desarrollo de los estudiantes. El objetivo de este estudio fue conocer los resultados de la implementación de dicho modelo, generado mediante estrategias andragógicas y tecnológicas para facilitar la formación profesional en la Ingeniería en Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicación de la Uttec.
 En cuanto a los aspectos metodológicos de la investigación, se consideró un enfoque mixto debido a que se combinó tanto la parte cuantitativa como cualitativa. Además, por el dinamismo del proyecto, se utilizó tanto el esquema inductivo como el deductivo. Por otro lado, el diseño de la investigación fue no experimental bajo un método de investigación-acción. Respecto a los resultados de la evaluación obtenidos del pilotaje realizado, más de 65.57 % de los estudiantes que trabajaron el modelo de tutoría virtual están totalmente de acuerdo con los resultados; 28.72 % ni de acuerdo ni en desacuerdo, y 5.71 % no está de acuerdo. Aunado a ello, se obtuvieron en la parte cualitativa retroalimentaciones importantes para realizar mejoras en el proyecto, con lo cual se podrá elevar el índice de satisfacción.

The Table to Tablet (T2T) Speech and Language Therapy Software Development Roadmap.

BackgroundFew studies have analyzed gains in using computers in speech and language therapy interventions for children with speech and/or language disorders when compared to a control group, but virtual tutors and computer-based visual feedback have been gaining interest in the literature. Previous systematic reviews mainly focused on development technological details of computer-based speech training systems or the potential of integrating mobile technology into education and rehabilitation, but recent systematic reviews have also evaluated the efficacy of computer-based speech and language therapy for children and how digital technology can support different activities, at school or elsewhere.ObjectiveThis study aimed to analyze a continuous communication and joint team approach to develop solutions focused on the real needs of end users, which digitally emulate reliable and validated physical intervention materials for children with speech sound disorders (SSD).MethodsThe Table to Tablet (T2T) software was developed using a design-based research methodology, which included four phases: activities development; ethnographic pretesting with a sample from the target population; software development; and beta-testing. The technology used to develop the software, the method used to ensure satisfaction and replay ability of the intervention materials, and results from the ethnographic and beta-testing phases are presented.ResultsNineteen activities were developed during the first phase, which were then tested, with 7 service users, using a physical prototype. The beta-test approach included extensive testing and reformulation, supported by direct, nonparticipant observation and data collection using a questionnaire designed for children. Feedback was used to improve the software and interaction with users.ConclusionsThe use of T2T-based intervention programmes by speech and language therapists (SLTs) will allow these professionals to make a better and more effective communication intervention, based on proven methodologies, that coexists in a structured physical and a digital version. These versions provide a full, 6-week intervention program, with minimal effort in preparing the session by the SLTs while delivering a very consistent intervention, with high replay value. A continuous communication and joint team approach was beneficial to the project and to the development of a solution focused on the real needs of SLTs and children with SSD. All problems were approached as a team with different skills and expertise, which minimized errors (eg, the developer making choices that would save him from spending time doing something that would not be used) and time spent. To add to this, the importance of integrating the end users as testers and collecting their opinions and actions per session allowed the production of better-targeted activities.Trial RegistrationClinicalTrials.gov NCT02490826; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02490826

The Personality of AI Systems in Education: Experiences with the Watson Tutor, a one-on-one virtual tutoring system

As artificially intelligent systems make their foray into the day-to-day educational experiences of students, we need to pay careful attention to the relationship between the system and the student. In this article, the authors discuss designing the personality of a virtual tutoring system called IBM Watson Tutor. The AI personality is key to the students' level of engagement and satisfaction with their experience. The designers have examined the qualities of effective human tutors, and used that insight as inspiration.

A virtual tutor movement learning system in eLearning

This paper provides a training system with an augmented reality interactive body movement for movement learning, such as gymnastics, martial arts, sports or dance learners. The technology of depth image sensor is used to detect, track and measure the body’s movements to collect the path of body’s movement in 3D space, and all images has been further modified to reveal the function of feedback immediately. The learner follows up the pre-recorded tutor’s movement to imitate tutor’s movement step by step. The training system would judge whether the learner’s movement correct or not, compares with tutor’s, and offer an analysis result in-situ. The learner could get a training as well as real expert guides without any constraints of space and time and with low cost in this system.

Virtual Tutoring in Mexican Computer Assisted Learning for Marginalized Populations

Virtual Tutoring in Mexican Computer Assisted Learning for Marginalized Populations

Virtual Tutoring in Mexican Computer Assisted Learning for Marginalized Populations

Virtual Tutoring in Mexican Computer Assisted Learning for Marginalized Populations

Early science learning with a virtual tutor through multimedia explanations and feedback on spoken questions

The purpose of this pilot study with a within-subject design was to gain a deeper understanding about the promise and restrictions of a virtual tutoring system designed to teach science to first grade students in Finland. Participants were 61 students who received six tutoring science sessions of approximately 20 min each. Sessions consisted of a sequence of narrated multimedia science presentations during which a virtual tutor explained science phenomena displayed in pictures. Narrated science explanations were followed by one or more multiple choice questions with immediate feedback about students’ choices and a possible second attempt, during which students reached 97% accuracy. A pretest and posttest was administered to assess students’ ability to reason about the science and to transfer knowledge to new contexts. Results indicated significantly greater improvement in the understanding of the science concepts taught during the tutoring sessions, relative to the concepts that were not taught. Results from the surveys administered to teachers and students indicated that the program was well received. Detailed analysis of student error responses provided a deeper understanding about the complex interplay between students’ prior knowledge, the way topics were taught in the multimedia lessons, and the way learning was assessed. Findings from the quantitative and qualitative analyses are discussed in the context of designing high quality lessons delivered through a virtual tutoring system.

Propuesta de modelo tecnológico para Flipped Classroom (T-FliC) en educación superior

The Technology Model, called T-FliC is proposed for Flipped Classroom. The aim is to provide IT facilities to the aforementioned pedagogical model. This proposal may be implemented at different levels of higher education. T-FliC is primarily based on the use of free technology resources, especially Google applications such as Classroom, Drive, and YouTube, because they are widely used by students and teachers. This extensive use permits to replicate this model in different educational contexts. The T-FliC model incorporates five ICT phases, ranging from the planning of teaching-learning activities to continuous learning assessments. The implementation of the T-FliC Model includes the following phases: a digital class (learning outside the classroom) with asynchronous guidance of a virtual tutor; a workshop involving dynamic activities for collaborative work (classroom learning) guided by a tutor in person; and an ongoing technological tools evaluation process (clickers, portfolio, and forum) which will generate the digital records of the student learning path. This article includes a bibliographic review of the role of ICT in the education processes and the fundamentals of the Flipped Classroom (FC) methodology. In the paper are included FC implementation experiences in higher education, followed by the presentation of the T-FliC Model as a technological proposal for this methodology. Finally, the conclusions present reflections on the proposal.

One-on-one and small group conversations with an intelligent virtual science tutor

In this study we investigated students' conversations with a virtual science tutor (Marni), either individually or in small groups. These constituted two treatment conditions. Students were presented with narrated multimedia science problems and explanations followed by question-answer dialogs with the virtual tutor. Students who received either one-on-one or small group tutoring received the same set of multimedia presentations and questions posed by the virtual tutor. Students in the small group condition discussed their answer before one student from that group responded to the tutor. We asked if students receiving tutoring using the virtual tutor in groups would demonstrate learning gains equivalent to those of students receiving one-on-one tutoring. We also asked if both groups would demonstrate greater learning gains from pretest to posttest than students in business-as-usual (control) classrooms who did not receive supplemental tutoring. One hundred eighty-three (183) students (in 13 classrooms at 4 schools) participated in the study. Of the 183 students, 114 were randomly assigned to tutoring in small groups using Marni; and 69 students received one-on-one tutoring with Marni. When compared with the control group, effect sizes for were d = 0.048 for the group tutoring condition and d = 0.51 for the one-on-one tutoring condition. A two-way ANOVA suggested a main effect for tutoring group, F = 16.8, df (41,171), p < 0.001. In general, students reported benefiting from listening to one another, and from the small group interactions, even though they sometimes disagreed with the answer reported by the small group. We conclude our findings with a vision for a next generation of virtual science tutors that can facilitate discourse and argumentation among students in small groups, leading students to build on each other's ideas to construct accurate science explanations.

Supporting Students' Mental Health and Academic Success Through Mobile App and IoT

Smartphones have become devices of choice for running studies on health and well-being, especially among young people. When entering college, students often face many challenges, such as adaptation to new situations, establish new interpersonal relationships, heavier workload and shorter deadlines, teamwork assignments and others. In this paper, the results of four studies examining students' well-being and mental health as well as student's perception of challenges and obstacles they face during their academic journey are presented. In addition, a mobile application that acts as a complement to a successful tutoring project implemented at the authors' University is proposed. The application allows students to keep their schedules and deadlines in one place while incorporating virtual tutor features. By using both, the events from the student's calendar and his or her mood indicators, the application sends notifications accordingly. These notifications encompass motivational phrases, time management guidelines, as well as relaxation tips.

Understanding the impact of animated gesture performance on personality perceptions

Applications such as virtual tutors, games, and natural interfaces increasingly require animated characters to take on social roles while interacting with humans. The effectiveness of these applications depends on our ability to control the social presence of characters, including their personality. Understanding how movement impacts the perception of personality allows us to generate characters more capable of fulfilling this social role. The two studies described herein focus on gesture as a key component of social communication and examine how a set of gesture edits, similar to the types of changes that occur during motion warping, impact the perceived personality of the character. Surprisingly, when based on thin-slice gesture data, people's judgments of character personality mainly fall in a 2D subspace rather than independently impacting the full set of traits in the standard Big Five model of personality. These two dimensions areplasticity, which includes extraversion and openness, andstability, which includes emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. A set of motion properties is experimentally determined that impacts each of these two traits. We show that when these properties are systematically edited in new gesture sequences, we can independently influence the character's perceived stability and plasticity (and the corresponding Big Five traits), to generate distinctive personalities. We identify motion adjustments salient to each judgment and, in a series of perceptual studies, repeatedly generate four distinctly perceived personalities. The effects extend to novel gesture sequences and character meshes, and even largely persist in the presence of accompanying speech. This paper furthers our understanding of how gesture can be used to control the perception of personality and suggests both the potential and possible limits of motion editing approaches.

Exploring the affective, motivational and cognitive effects of pedagogical agent enthusiasm in a multimedia learning environment

In a traditional classroom environment, instructor enthusiasm has been shown to enhance student’s emotion, affective perceptions, intrinsic motivation, and cognitive outcome. Additionally, emotional response theory argues that enthusiastic verbal and nonverbal cues of an instructor will induce positive emotional states in learners, which in turn, enact learners’ approach behaviours in the learning process. Therefore, should a pedagogical agent convey enthusiastic behaviours in a multimedia learning environment? Literature and theoretical reviews offer two competing views. The first view, based on emotional response theory, predicts that enthusiastic verbal and nonverbal cues of a pedagogical agent can induce higher positive emotions in learners, which in turn, enhance affective perceptions, intrinsic motivation, and cognitive outcome. However, the second view, based on cognitive load theory, suggests that pedagogical agent enthusiasm may increase extraneous cognitive load (additional processing in the mind), which negatively impact emotion, affective perceptions, intrinsic motivation, and cognitive outcome. To investigate the effects of agent enthusiasm, seventy-two university freshmen interacted with either an enthusiastic agent or a neutral agent (operationalized through vocal tones, facial expression, gestures, and remarks) that simulates the instructional role of a virtual tutor that delivers narrative demonstrations on how to predict the outputs of C-Programming algorithms. The results of our study showed that pedagogical agent enthusiasm significantly enhanced emotion, intrinsic motivation, affective perceptions, and cognitive outcome. Moreover, mediation analyses revealed that the facilitating effects of agent enthusiasm on intrinsic motivation, affective perceptions of the learning environment, and affective perceptions of the pedagogical agent were fully mediated by a learner’s positive emotion, thus demonstrating that the framework of emotional response theory can be applied to learner-agent interaction in a multimedia learning environment. Implications and suggestions for future research related to pedagogical agent enthusiasm are discussed in this paper.

Monitoring the Results of the Tutoring Program in its Face-to-Face and Virtual Modalities on the Academic Achievement of Students at a Mexican University

The tutorship program is aimed at supporting students throughout their university career and its objective is to prevent future problems of adaptation in the educational ambience as well as intervening in matters of academic achievement. At the Instituto Tecnológico de Sonora (Technological Institute of Sonora) (ITSON), the individual tutorship program began in 2000. In 2002 group tutoring began in order to see to the entire first year student population and today group tutoring is offered in both the face-to-face and virtual modalities. The general objective of the present study is to determine the impact the programs of face-to-face and virtual tutoring at the ITSON has had on students’ academic achievement, during the four semesters after having participated in this program. Information on 2,995 students from the different areas of study offered at the university was collected from databases which existed at the Institute and analyzed using different statistical techniques. The tutoring program is shown to have had a favorable impact on the index of students’ failing classes, during the semester they were enrolled in tutoring, but not during the subsequent semesters, during which they did not participate in the tutorship program. The grade point averages obtained by students who had face-to-face tutoring were statistically different from those of the students who did not have tutoring. This was true for all of the semesters analyzed. The same thing happened with the students who had virtual tutoring except for during the second semester when the two were statistically equal.

A virtual tutor for children with autism

PurposeThe picture exchange communication system (PECS) is an established communication intervention for non-verbal children with autism. The purpose of this paper is to present an evaluation of a computer-based PECS approach, in which young non-verbal children with autism respond to an on-screen “virtual tutor” through the manipulation of picture/symbol cards. The paper presents research to investigate how the virtual tutor’s voice influences the children’s participation and performance.Design/methodology/approachEight non-verbal children between six and nine years old and with a diagnosis of autism were presented with a series of computer-based activities, using a virtual tutor with either a natural or synthetic voice, in two separate sessions. Data were gathered using a within-participants counterbalanced design to control against variations between individuals and effects of presentation order.FindingsAnalysis of the children’s responses suggest that they were able to use the system more effectively when the virtual tutor had a synthetic voice, rather than a human voice. The findings demonstrate that a computer-based virtual tutor can provide an engaging method of supporting symbol-based communication for non-verbal children with autism, and that a synthetic voice type was preferable for the sessions undertaken.Originality/valueInvestigations of voice type and its influence on non-verbal children’s participation and performance have so far provided inconclusive results (Ramdoss, 2013). This research suggests that the voice type is an important feature of the learning experience of non-verbal children with autism, and can have a significant influence on their participation and performance in virtual tutor-led learning.

Subjective Well-being (Sb) and Burnout Syndrome (BnS): Correlational Analysis Teleworkers Education Sector

Abstract This work is derived from a quantitative research approach, correlational design, with teachers under the system of telework, in a state institution of education for work and human development, in order to document mental health indicators from Welfare subjective (satisfaction with life) (Sl) and the burnout syndrome (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and personal accomplishment). (BnS) The exercise is performed with a population of 156 virtual tutors, who meet inclusion criteria and who are assessed with the following instruments: Survey Sociodemographic, Scale Satisfaction with Life (The Satisfaction with Life Scale, SWSL) and Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI). The results of this research show the inverse and significant negative correlation between positive and significant emotional exhaustion and depersonalization (SBN) and, between life satisfaction and personal fulfillment (SBN), validated with Cronbach's alphas, found Scale Life Satisfaction (SWSL), 0.86; and the Maslach scale was 0.78. This process enables to supply documentary evidence regarding the level of Health and Welfare teleworkers, from job satisfaction, autonomy and flexibility in executive functions, and the decisive role of identity, self-awareness, self-control and self-efficacy in this, working model as elements that counteract the possibility of burnout syndrome.

5. FACTORES QUE CONTRIBUYEN AL PROCESO DE TUTORIZACIÓN VIRTUAL EN LA UPEL-IPRGR

La presente investigación tiene como propósito establecer los factores que permite la tutorización en línea basado en los referentes teóricos de las funciones y roles del tutor virtual. El estudio tuvo como muestra 77 estudiantes de postgrado que experimentaron su aprendizaje en el aula virtual de la Universidad Pedagógica Experimental Libertador “Gervasio Rubio”, Edo Táchira. La investigación en el ámbito metodológico es de naturaleza cuantitativa bajo el nivel descriptivo y se basó en el análisis factorial como técnica estadística, donde se aplicó un cuestionario conformado por 21 ítems. En el estudio se evidenció que el docente de forma regular focaliza las discusiones en los foros de discusión, lo que dificulta la interacción social de los estudiantes durante las actividades educativas en el aula virtual y el aprendizaje colaborativo.

INTERAÇÕES VIRTUAIS ENTRE TUTORES E ESTUDANTES NO MOODLE: PROCESSOS EDUCATIVOS EM CONTEXTO DE ESTÁGIO NA EDUCAÇÃO INFANTIL

O artigo tem como objetivo identificar processos educativos desencadeados pela troca de e-mails internos no Moodle, entre tutoras virtuais e estudantes na disciplina de ‘Estágio Supervisionado em Educação Infantil’, em um curso de Pedagogia a distância. Aproximar-se &#x0D; desta ferramenta de interação virtual, delega destaque à tecnologia como mediação de processos de ensino e aprendizagem que podem ser lidos a partir da compreensão de práticas sociais. Compreende-se que as interações virtuais revelaram uma relação pedagógica de qualidade, promotoras do acesso legítimo aos conhecimentos científicos no campo da docência na educação infantil. As relações humanas efetivadas colaboraram à construção de vínculos afetivos entre estudantes e tutoras, de modo que a identificação dos processos educativos puderam constituir conhecimentos compartilhados, que transcenderam dúvidas de ordem técnica da disciplina e estimularam a análise crítica da realidade encontrada em estágio.