A Review of the Practical Applications of Pedagogic Conversational Agents to Be Used in School and University Classrooms

Abstract

Pedagogic Conversational Agents (PCAs) can be defined as autonomous characters that cohabit learning environments with students to create rich learning interactions. Currently, there are many agents reported in the literature of this fast-evolving field. In this paper, several designs of PCAs used as instructors, students, or companions are reviewed using a taxonomy to analyze the possibilities that PCAs can bring into the classrooms. Finally, a discussion as to whether this technology could become the future of education depending on the design trends identified is open for any educational technology practitioner, researcher, teacher, or manager involved in 21st century education.

Are We There Yet? - A Systematic Literature Review on Chatbots in Education

“…Besides, the chatbots studied had a strong tendency to use English, at 89%. This high number aligns with results from (Pérez-Marín, 2021), where 75% of observed agents, as a related technology, were designed to interact in the English language. (Pérez-Marín, 2021) also shows that 42% of the analyzed chatbots had mixed interaction modalities.…”

“…This high number aligns with results from (Pérez-Marín, 2021), where 75% of observed agents, as a related technology, were designed to interact in the English language. (Pérez-Marín, 2021) also shows that 42% of the analyzed chatbots had mixed interaction modalities. Finally, (Hobert and Meyer von Wolff, 2019) observed that only 25% of examined chatbots were incorporated in formal learning settings, the majority of published material focuses on student-chatbot interaction only and does not enable student-student communication, as well as nearly two-thirds of the analyzed chatbots center only on a single domain.…”

“…One classification framework is defined through "flow chatbots," "artificially intelligent chatbots," "chatbots with integrated speech recognition," as well as "chatbots with integrated context-data" by (Winkler and Soellner, 2018). A second classification framework by (Pérez-Marín, 2021) covers pedagogy, social, and HCI features of chatbots and agents, which themselves can be further subdivided into more detailed aspects. Other Classification Aspects (DC2) derived from several publications, provide another classification schema, which distinguishes between "retrieval vs. generative" based technology, the "ability to incorporate context data," and "speech or text interface" (Winkler and Soellner, 2018;Smutny and Schreiberova, 2020).…”

“…Secondly, we aim to explore the pedagogical roles of chatbots in the existing literature (Goal 2) to understand how chatbots can take over tasks from teachers. (Winkler and Soellner, 2018) and (Pérez-Marín, 2021), identified research gaps for supporting meta-cognitive skills with chatbots such as selfregulation. This requires a chatbot application that takes a mentoring role, as the development of these meta-cognitive skills can not be achieved solely by information delivery.…”

“…For this reason, they have also been proposed and researched for a variety of applications in education (Winkler and Soellner, 2018). Recent literature reviews on chatbots in education (Winkler and Soellner, 2018;Hobert, 2019a;Hobert and Meyer von Wolff, 2019;Jung et al, 2020;Pérez et al, 2020;Smutny and Schreiberova, 2020;Pérez-Marín, 2021) have reported on such applications as well as design guidelines, evaluation possibilities, and effects of chatbots in education.…”