Society and (higher) education have changed rapidly in recent decades. For example, since knowledge has become more volatile, life-long learning has become increasingly important. Higher education itself has been subject of change in the last decade as well. Particularly in the wake of social-constructivist theories, many institutes have transformed their learning approach to a model in which students are involved in different activities at different moments. Thus, student populations are becoming more heterogeneous. For example, they have different tutoring needs. This leads to an increasing workload for teachers. At the same time, students have changed in their expectations. A young generation of students, who grew up with ICT embedded in their daily lives, have become used to the almost instant availability of knowledge and accessibility of people through the internet. The aim of this research paper is to propose a solution for the extensive and diverse tutoring needs that have arisen in these novel societal and educational settings. Peer tutoring is indicated to be a promising replacement for teacher guidance in certain contexts. An important problem in its implementation, however, is how peers should be matched and how the tutoring itself should be organised. Instant messaging is proposed as a possible vehicle for solving these problems. Our study focuses on developing a system for automated allocated peer tutoring through instant messaging. A first version of the system was made available to two groups of students, one in distance education, the other in regular education. A selection of students participated in interviews, providing data on the feasibility and acceptance of this implementation of allocated synchronous peer tutoring. The interview data indicate that students are positive towards system-allocated peer tutoring, but that the context in which it is implemented is crucial.
Robot tutors provide new opportunities for education. However, they also introduce moral challenges. This study reports a systematic literature re-view (N = 256) aimed at identifying the moral considerations related to ro-bots in education. While our findings suggest that robot tutors hold great potential for improving education, there are multiple values of both (special needs) children and teachers that are impacted (positively and negatively) by its introduction. Positive values related to robot tutors are: psychological welfare and happiness, efficiency, freedom from bias and usability. However, there are also concerns that robot tutors may negatively impact these same values. Other concerns relate to the values of friendship and attachment, human contact, deception and trust, privacy, security, safety and accountability. All these values relate to children and teachers. The moral values of other stakeholder groups, such as parents, are overlooked in the existing literature. The results suggest that, while there is a potential for ap-plying robot tutors in a morally justified way, there are imported stake-holder groups that need to be consulted to also take their moral values into consideration by implementing tutor robots in an educational setting. (from Narcis.nl)
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Maintaining the child-robot relationship after a significant break, such as a holiday, is an important step for developing sustainable social robots for education. We ran a four-session user study (n = 113 children) that included a nine-month break between the third and fourth session. During the study, participants practiced math with the help of a social robot math tutor. We found that social personalization is an effective strategy to better sustain the child-robot relationship than the absence of social personalization. To become reacquainted after the long break, the robot summarizes a few pieces of information it had stored about the child. This gives children a feeling of being remembered, which is a key contributor to the effectiveness of social personalization. Enabling the robot to refer to information previously shared by the child is another key contributor to social personalization. Conditional for its effectiveness, however, is that children notice these memory references. Finally, although we found that children's interest in the tutoring content is related to relationship formation, personalizing the topics did not lead to more interest in the content. It seems likely that not all of the memory information that was used to personalize the content was up-to-date or socially relevant.
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