In recent decades, the number of students per lecturer at universities has constantly risen. In these learning scenarios, individual lecturer support for helping students actively acquiring new knowledge is hardly possible. However, active student behavior is necessary for successful learning. Smart Personal Assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Home promise to fill this gap by being students’ individual tutors. In order to understand what students expect from Smart Personal Assistants as tutors and how they ...

The skills students need nowadays have changed over the last decades. The required skills are shifting more and more towards higher order thinking skills, such as critical thinking, collaboration and communication. One of the main ways of practicing these skills is through formative feedback, which consists of self-assessment and peer-assessment in our setting. However, today’s lecturers are facing the challenge that the number of students per lecture is continuously increasing, while the available budget is stagnating. ...

Despite a growing body of research about the design and use of Smart Personal Assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Assistant, little is known about their ability to help educators offering individual support in large-scale learning environments. Smart Personal Assistant ecosystems empower educators to develop their own agents without deep technological knowledge. The objective of this paper is to design and validate a method that helps educators to create Smart Personal Assistants as learning tutors. Using ...

Technology-mediated learning (TML) is a major trend in education, since it allows to integrate the strengths of traditional- and IT-based learning activities. However, TML providers still struggle in identifying areas for improvement in their TML offerings. One reason for their struggles is inconsistencies in the literature regarding drivers of TML performance. Prior research suggests that these inconsistencies in TML literature might stem from neglecting the importance of considering the process perspective in ...

With the increasing popularity of massive open online courses, universities are able to reach a wider audience without restriction and for comparably low costs. However, in these learning environments, educators are hardly able to offer individual support to their learners. According to learning theory, the lack of individual support in online learning environments can considerably limit learning success. In our paper, we argue that new emerging Smart Personal Assistants (SPAs) have the capabilities to address this ...

Today’s graduating students face ever-changing environments when they enter their job life. Educational institutions must therefore continuously develop their course structure and content in order to prepare their students to be future employees. A very important means for developing the courses is the students’ course evaluations. Due to financial and organizational restrictions, these course evaluations are usually carried out quantitatively and at the end of the semester. However, past research has shown that this ...

Die Digitalisierung führt zu neuen Anforderungen an Fähigkeiten und Kenntnissen, die Studierende in ihrem zukünftigen Berufsleben benötigen. Metakognitive Lernkompetenzen und Higher Order Thinking Skills werden dabei immer wichtiger, um Herausforderungen der Zukunft zu lösen. Eine Unterklasse dieser Fähigkeiten, die wesentlich zu Kommunikation, Kollaboration und Problemlösung beiträgt, ist die Fähigkeit, strukturiert und reflektierend zu argumentieren. Bildungseinrichtungen haben jedoch Schwierigkeiten, die für die ...