Abstract
All changes are difficult and moving from face-to-face to online learning is not an exception. Nowadays, online students have many supports to ease their learning process due to the evolution of Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), the maturity of the pedagogical models used, and the vast experience of online teachers who design, create and deploy successful learning activities and accompany students through these activities. However, these supports are mainly centralized within the contexts of the VLE or the virtual classrooms. Therefore, new online learners should get the necessary habits to enter the VLE and the classrooms frequently. In this research we present an ongoing study in which robots are used as personalized companions of new students. Robots provide personal feedback to each student with the aim of promoting behavioral changes that facilitate the learning experience of new students and potentially reduce their dropout.
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Acknowledgments
This work has been partially supported by the eLearn Center of the UOC through the project titled “Botter: a personal robot for novel UOC students” and by European Commission through the project “colMOOC: Integrating Conversational Agents and Learning Analytics in MOOCs” (588438-EPP-1-2017-1-EL-EPPKA2-KA). This research has also been supported by Seidor Labs department of Seidor company, who, as a UOC’s technology provider, implemented the robots and the interaction between them and the UOC campus.
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Conesa, J. et al. (2021). Towards the Use of Personal Robots to Improve the Online Learning Experience. In: Barolli, L., Takizawa, M., Yoshihisa, T., Amato, F., Ikeda, M. (eds) Advances on P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud and Internet Computing. 3PGCIC 2020. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 158. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61105-7_18
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