The Chronicle: Virtual Tutors Guide Students but Aren’t Quite Ready to Replace Professors
Amy L. Baylor is trying to create the perfect professor — or at least the perfect computerized stand-in for a professor.
In her laboratory at Florida State University, she is designing digital, animated talking heads that can respond to a variety of student questions, lead online discussions, or just encourage students to keep at a challenging problem. She calls them “pedagogical agents,” and they are actually more like digital tutors than professors. (Ms. Baylor stresses that her creations are in no way meant to replace the work of professors.)
Even though they are just pixels on the screen, these virtual teachers can provide better help for students than other forms of online learning aids, says Ms. Baylor, an associate professor of instructional systems and director of the university’s Center for Research of Innovative Technologies for Learning. She says her computer models are far more sophisticated than the animated paper clip that pops up in Microsoft Word to offer occasional tips.”It’s giving you the information through voice and through gestures, like a person could, instead of through text,” says Ms. Baylor. “People would rather see a face than text, especially if it’s in the context of coaching or helping you try to do something.”
And part of the virtual tutors’ power, she says, is that they can be crafted to evoke just the right emotional or motivational response. “You can program them to be exactly the way you want them to be, and you can change them and customize them for the learner,” says Ms. Baylor.
One area of Ms. Baylor’s research is figuring out what look works best for virtual professors. Should they be young and hip? Or do students respond better to older, distinguished-looking virtual helpers?
In a recent study by Ms. Baylor supported by the National Science Foundation, 79 female students in an introductory course on education technology were shown a variety of virtual characters and asked to choose the one they each most identified with, the one that looked most like an engineer, and others that fit other criteria.
The character that each student selected as the one “you would like to learn from” then came to life on the screen and delivered a 10-minute speech about prominent female engineers and the benefits of engineering careers. After using the software, the participants expressed significantly more interest in hard sciences as careers and more confidence in their mathematics skills than they did earlier in the semester.
When asked to select which virtual professor they would most like to learn about engineering from, the participants chose a male tutor, one who was designed to look “uncool but attractive,” according to a report on the study.
“Male characters are always rated as more credible than female,” Ms. Baylor says, noting that that finding is consistent with other studies she has done. “It is a societal thing that unfortunately translates to computers.”
Her studies have shown, however, that “female agents are more motivating than male agents,” she says, “regardless of whether you’re a female or a male.”
‘As if They’re Real People’
Other researchers have been developing similar virtual tutors for years, and they say their creations have had a proven impact on education.
Ronald A. Cole, a professor and director of the Center for Spoken Language Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has created several virtual agents to teach reading to children.
In a recent survey of 129 children using his latest software, 95 said they spent more time on reading activities with the software than without it.
And the children frequently talk back to the virtual tutor, named Marni, as if it were an actual person, he says. “One of the things we learned most is how much people interact with computer characters as if they’re real people,” Mr. Cole says. “And it’s not just children.”
Mr. Cole says the software can be an effective replacement for one-on-one tutoring, which is expensive for school systems. He has also developed interactive tutors to help conduct speech therapy for people with Parkinson’s disease or other disorders.
Mr. Cole has released a “tool kit” designed to let others build on his virtual agents to create learning software for other subject areas. The tool kit is free for noncommercial use and is available online.
Not all researchers who build virtual tutors think they need to be embodied in visual characters.
Kurt VanLehn, a professor of computer science and a director of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center at the University of Pittsburgh, has developed a text-based virtual tutor to help college students learn physics.
He says the software essentially “watches” students as they complete physics problems, and it can respond if the student clicks a button asking for help. “When the person has asked for help because they can’t take the next step in solving the problem, then it gives them a hint, such as, Think about the direction of the acceleration of the car,” says Mr. VanLehn.
The software was developed in conjunction with the U.S. Naval Academy, which uses it for some courses, he says.
At one point, Mr. VanLehn says, he considered adding a visual component that would have a talking-head character deliver the advice that now arrives in pop-up text windows, but instructors working with the software said they thought that was unnecessary. “The literature on the talking heads is mixed,” he says.
But he says that the idea of developing computer programs to help students plow through homework assignments interactively is one that will catch on, regardless of what the software looks like. “This is the future,” he says.
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