Using Smart Personal Assistants for Online Learning Activities: What benefits can we expect?

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 problem by building up an interaction with the learner similar to a human tutor. Drawing on the concept of the Interactive, Constructive, Active and Passive (ICAP) Framework, we designed an experiment with 76 participants, where one group received text-based learning materials and the other group received additional scaffolds from an interactive, text-based smart personal assistant. Posttest-score comparisons revealed that learners interacting with the SPA were able to achieve higher learning outcomes.