Are Virtual Teachers better than Human counterparts?

Digital Tutors Prove Effective As They Can Be More Adaptive

Boston: Never let schooling get in the way of your education, Mark Twain supposedly said, and the latest advances in psychology and behaviour science take that to a new dimension—virtual reality and the digital domain.
Virtual characters and digital tutors are helping children and adults develop advanced social and language skills that can be tough to learn via conventional approaches, according to researchers.
Justine Cassell of Northwestern University has found that children with autism can develop advanced social skills by interacting with a “virtual child” that they might not develop by hanging out with real children or teachers.
Cassell is credited with developing the Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA), a virtual human capable of interacting with humans using language and gestures.
Her “virtual child” is a cartoon about the size of an 8-yearold with whom kids can learn and play on the floor with toys via a plasma screen projection. The cartoon looks like a boy to boys and like a girl to girl, and is racially ambiguous, so no one feels left out.
The language skills of children who played with the virtual child improved and their social-interaction skills improved, Cassell’s research shows. “They played nicer,” doing better at taking turns, she told Livescience.
The virtual child has been tested and found to be an effective way to teach autistic children the ability to stay on topic in conversations, take turns to talk and nod when spoken to, she said.
Along similar lines, Dominic W Massaro of the University of California has developed software that presents 3-D animated “tutors” or talking heads that are useful in teaching remedial readers, children with language challenges and anyone learning a second language. His teachers are less cartoonish than Cassell’s, and the focus is on speech accuracy.
One of the tutors (or embodied agents) developed by Massaro, ‘Baldi’, can be programmed to enhance “errorfree learning” so that the tutor doesn’t say, “That’s wrong”, when students make mistakes, but instead offers informative feedback that helps students see their error and do better.
“Working with Baldi can be less intimidating because students don’t feel shy about making mistakes,” said Massaro.
Despite the efficacy of digital approaches to education, there is a reluctance in society for such tools to become widespread, a discomfort with the idea that human teachers might be replaced by virtual teachers on a widescale basis, Cassel said. AGENCIES