Indian Journal of Science and Technology
DOI: 10.17485/ijst/2015/v8i11/71792
Year: 2015, Volume: 8, Issue: 11, Pages:
Original Article
Chandra Reka Ramachandiran1,2* and Nazean Jomhari1
1 Department of Software Engineering, Faculty of Information Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, Malaysia
2 School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Taylor’s University Lakeside Campus, Selangor, Malaysia; chandrareka@hotmail.com
The emergence of Web 5.0 technologies has made educators to think of pedagogical virtual agents as an effective e-learning tool. Since the success of an e-learning tool relies mainly on the acceptable level of the tool by the e-Learners and their state of emotion while using the tool, it is important to address the e-Learner’s emotional competencies. The present study examined the impact of pedagogical virtual agents, as operationalized by agent’s demographic features, e-Learners’ perceptions on virtual agents and their Kansei experience. 95 university freshmen from a private higher learning institution participated in this research. Consistent with similarity-attraction hypothesis, attraction-realism hypothesis, and Kansei Experience- hypothesis, it was found that: (1) e-Learners assigned higher ratings for pedagogical agents who have many similar demographic features as them, (2) e-Learners reported higher positive emotion ratings for attractive virtual agents, (3) there is a positive and significant relationship between the attractiveness of the pedagogical virtual agent and the realistic appearance of the agent. Some implications of this research are discussed in this paper.
Keywords: Attraction, e-Learners, Kansei Engineering, Pedagogical Virtual Agent, Realism
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