Towards Virtual Agents for Supporting Appropriate Small Group Behaviors in Educational Contexts

Abstract

Verbal and non-verbal behaviors that we use in order to effectively communicate with other people are vital for our success in our daily lives. Despite the importance of social skills, creating standardized methods for training them and supporting their training is challenging. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) may have a good potential to support social and emotional learning (SEL) through virtual social demonstration games. This paper presents initial work involving the design of a pedagogical scenario to facilitate teaching of socially appropriate and inappropriate behaviors when entering and standing in a small group of people, a common occurrence in collaborative social situations. This is achieved through the use of virtual characters and, initially, virtual reality (VR) environments for supporting situated learning in multiple contexts. We describe work done thus far on the demonstrator scenario and anticipated potentials, pitfalls and challenges involved in the approach.

A Study of Students’ Preferences in The Information Resources of The Digital Learning Environment

“…Personalisation of information behaviour in the digital learning environment is one of the problems of education (Han and Ellis, 2020). Personalisation requires simultaneous consideration of many factors, e.g., risks of dripping out (Xing and Du, 2019), need for emotional support, and behavioural regulation (Zojaji and Peters, 2019). Quantities and correlations of these factors are not constant and alter in the educational process.…”