Bot Undercover: On the Use of Conversational Agents to Stimulate Teacher-Students Interaction in Remote Learning

In this work, the use of an undercover conversational agent, acting as a participative student in a synchronous virtual reality distance learning scenario is proposed to stimulate social interaction between teacher and students. The outcome of an exploratory user study indicated that the undercover conversational agent is capable of fostering interaction, relieving social pressure, and overall leading to a more satisfactory and engaging learning experience without sacrificing learning performance.