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 interact with them, we will carry out an experiment. In this research in progress paper, we present our experiment design, where we observe the individual interaction between students and a Smart Personal Assistant tutor and between students and a human tutor applying the same methods in both cases. Drawing on the concepts of parasocial interaction and trust, we derive hypotheses, present the Smart Personal Assistant development and explain the experiment process in detail.
@inproceedings{doi:10.17170/kobra-202104163685,
author ={Winkler, Rainer and Bittner, Eva and Söllner, Matthias},
keywords ={004 and 370 and Assistenzsystem and Computerunterstütztes Lernen and Mensch-Maschine-Kommunikation and Experiment},
title ={Alexa, Can You Help Me Solve That Problem? - Understanding the Value of Smart Personal Assistants as Tutors for Complex Problem Tasks},
copyright ={http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/},
language ={en},
year ={2019}
}