What does the pedagogical agent say?

Abstract

The successful employment of Virtual Reality Environments in distance education contexts led to the development of various frameworks and taxonomies related to the Virtual-Learning approach. However, when it comes to Blended or 'Hybrid' Virtual Learning (HVL) scenarios, where the learners are concurrently co-present both in the physical and in the virtual environment, the lines are hard to be drawn as this has been a relatively unexplored area. Considering the aforementioned change in the setup of the educational context, different implications, challenges and outcomes are expected to be observed. Motivated by this shortcoming, we conducted a series of experiments with Computer Science and Technology students and investigated the impact of interactions on learners' motivation to engage with the 3D virtual world and the educational activities by extension. In this paper, we discuss students' preconceptions towards the inclusion of 3D Virtual Learning Environments in the context of their studies and further elicit their thoughts related to the impact of the 'hybrid' interactions. In addition, we investigate the educational value of different Non-Player Characters (Pedagogical Agents) and their impact on the attractiveness of the virtual world and the educational tasks. The concluding remarks provide guidance to educators and instructional designers who work in such setups or consider to employ Pedagogical Agents. To this end, employing Pedagogical Agents requires careful consideration as they need to be meaningful and fully incorporated in the learner's task. Another take-away message concerns the elements that foster a situated learning experience as they are associated with immersive experiences.