Conversations with Freudbot in Second Life: Mining the Virtuality of Relationship

Bob Heller

Journal of Interactive Learning Research Vol. 28, No. 4 (October 2017) pp. 359–370

The unstructured conversations of students who chatted with Freudbot in his Second Life virtual office over a 32 month period were examined in order to better understand the nature of the virtual relationship between students and conversational...

Conversational Agents as Historical Figures: Persona Effects in the Absence of Visual Information

Bob Heller

EdMedia + Innovate Learning 2016 (Jun 28, 2016) pp. 287–291

Three previously published studies were re-examined using a common set of measures to further explore the role of visual information when chatting with a conversational agent acting as a historical figure. One hundred and seventy students chatted...

Topics: Computer-Mediated Communication, Agents, SIG: Emerging Technologies for Learning and Teaching

Conversational Agents as Historical Figures: Individual Differences and Perceptions of Agent and Social Presence

Bob Heller

EdMedia: World Conference on Educational Media and Technology 2016 (Jun 28, 2016) pp. 1374–1380

Eight-six students chatted online for 10 minutes with a historical figure application of a conversational agent under 3 interface conditions; No Image, Static Image, or Animated Image with Voice. Students rated their perception of the agent and...

Topics: Agents, SIG: Emerging Technologies for Learning and Teaching

Conversational Agents and Learning Outcomes: An Experimental Investigation

Bob Heller; Mike Procter

World Conference on Educational Media and Technology 2007 (Jun 25, 2007) pp. 945–950

An experimental approach was used to compare two types of web interfaces (text-based vs. conversation-based) to content on the life and theories of Jean Piaget. The content in each interface was identical with the exception of third- vs. first...

Topics: Learning Outcomes, Distance Education

Visual Information Effects and Conversational Agents: Less is More

Bob Heller; Mike Procter

E-Learn: World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education 2019 (Nov 04, 2019) pp. 876–881

The present study is a partial replication of Heller and Procter (2009) who found that a conversational agent acting as a historical figure (Sigmund Freud) is rated more highly when there is no image accompanying the agent compared to either a...

Topics: Simulations for learning

Assessing the impact of intelligent interventions by conversational agents: Implications for pedagogical agent design

Mike Procter; Bob Heller; Oscar Lin

E-Learn: World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education 2017 (Oct 17, 2017) pp. 649–653

Researchers have acknowledged the important role of conversational agents in education but there has been very little research on the types of user conversations and whether different types of users might require different types of conversational...

Topics: research, Content Development

The Factor Structure of Teaching Development Needs for Distance-Delivered e-Learning

Heather Kanuka; Bob Heller; Kam Jugdev

International Journal for Academic Development Vol. 13, No. 2 (June 2008) pp. 129–139

The purpose of this study was to better identify directions for addressing the needs of academics in institutions of higher education who teach technologically-mediated, distance-delivered courses. This single-case study aimed to examine the factor...

Freudbot: An Investigation of Chatbot Technology in Distance Education

Bob Heller; Mike Proctor; Dean Mah; Lisa Jewell; Bill Cheung

World Conference on Educational Media and Technology 2005 (Jun 27, 2005) pp. 3913–3918

A chatbot named Freudbot was constructed using the open source architecture of AIML to determine if a famous person application of chatbot technology could improve student-content interaction in distance education. Fifty-three students in psychology ...

Topics: Distance Education, Educational Technology