Sara, the Lecturer: Improving Learning in Online Education with a Scaffolding-Based Conversational Agent
Open accessAbstract
Enrollment in online courses has sharply increased in higher education. Although online education can be scaled to large audiences, the lack of interaction between educators and learners is difficult to replace and remains a primary challenge in the field. Conversational agents may alleviate this problem by engaging in natural interaction and by scaffolding learners' understanding similarly to educators. However, whether this approach can also be used to enrich online video lectures has largely remained unknown. We developed Sara, a conversational agent that appears during an online video lecture. She provides scaffolds by voice and text when needed and includes a voice-based input mode. An evaluation with 182 learners in a 2 x 2 lab experiment demonstrated that Sara, compared to more traditional conversational agents, significantly improved learning in a programming task. This study highlights the importance of including scaffolding and voice-based conversational agents in online videos to improve meaningful learning.
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The chatbot facilitated the retention of Python programming knowledge.
“The chatbot also facilitated the retention of Python programming knowledge [32].”
From A Meta-Analysis and Systematic Review of the Effect of Chatbot Technology Use in Sustainable Education (2023) · cites this paper as [32]
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- Authors
- Winkler, R., Hobert, S., Salovaara, A., Söllner, M., & Leimeister, J. M.
- Affiliations
- University of St.Gallen (CH)
- University of Göttingen (DE)
- Aalto University (FI)
- University of Kassel (DE)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2020-04-21
- Pages
- 1-14
- OpenAlex
- W3029044752
- Cited by
- 177
- References
- 6
- Citations by year
- 2026: 12 · 2025: 40 · 2024: 27 · 2023: 36 · 2022: 31 · 2021: 25 · 2020: 5 · 2017: 1
- FWCI
- 9.25
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- Locations
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion)
- Alexandria (UniSG) (University of St.Gallen) (acceptedVersion)
- Alexandria (UniSG) (University of St.Gallen) (submittedVersion)
- GoeScholar The Publication Server of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Intelligent Tutoring Systems and Adaptive Learning
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Visual and Cognitive Learning Processes
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Innovative Teaching and Learning Methods
- Keywords
- chatbots, scaffolding, online learning, video lectures, voice interaction, programming learning, meaningful learning
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