Design and Evaluation of Embodied Conversational Agents for Educational and Advisory Software

Embodied conversational agents may take on a diversity of roles in learning and advisory scenarios including virtual teachers, advisors, learning companions and autonomous actors in educational role play. They promote learner motivation, engagement, and self-confidence, and may help prevent and overcome negative affective states of learners, such as frustration, and fear of failure. The chapter will provide guidelines and approved methods for the development of animated pedagogical agents including the extraction of multimodal tutorial strategies from human-human teaching dialogues as well as the simulation and evaluation of such strategies in computer-mediated learning environments.