Research Article
Question & Answering Interface to Improve the Students’ Experience in an E-learning Course with a Virtual Tutor
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-030-40180-1_5, author={Jo\"{a}o Balsa and Lu\^{\i}s Neves and Maria Carmo and Ana Cl\^{a}udio}, title={Question \& Answering Interface to Improve the Students’ Experience in an E-learning Course with a Virtual Tutor}, proceedings={Technology, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Education. 3rd EAI International Conference, TIE 2019, Braga, Portugal, October 17--18, 2019, Proceedings}, proceedings_a={TIE}, year={2020}, month={1}, keywords={Question \& Answering Virtual tutor E-learning}, doi={10.1007/978-3-030-40180-1_5} }- João Balsa
Luís Neves
Maria Carmo
Ana Cláudio
Year: 2020
Question & Answering Interface to Improve the Students’ Experience in an E-learning Course with a Virtual Tutor
TIE
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-40180-1_5
Abstract
E-learning courses offer, nowadays, opportunities for everyone to study wherever they are. However, asynchronous communication between students and teachers, and the lack of social engagement, leads frequently to a sense of abandonment and, in the limit, to withdrawal, as a consequence. To avoid this phenomenon, we developed an interface prototype with an anthropomorphic 3D virtual tutor in the Moodle’s e-learning platform of Universidade Aberta (). This virtual tutor helps students finding information in the page of the course, delivers speech, exhibits facial expressions and is able to answer questions about the course. This paper describes the approach used to implement this Q&A functionality. Having all the course information represented in an ontology, the idea is to transform the original question in a SPARQL query that, when executed on the defined ontology, returns the desired answer.