DBIS

Courses in higher education, e.g. at universities, face a challenge regarding scalability. Ideally, every student should be able to contact a mentor to benefit from the mentor’s experience and to reach the learning goals. However, if the number of participants in a course rises, the limited resources of the institution are quickly exhausted. This leads to a high workload for academic staff and decreases the mentoring quality since there is less time for mentors to address the individual needs of the students. A solution to this problem is socio-technical support for mentoring processes which combines social processes like peer mentoring and technological processes, e.g. for student’s feedback. As a result, text-based chat bots were created which can answer student’s questions and give feedback about exercises. We would now like to enhance the interaction with such bots by upgrading them to Mixed Reality agents. Such agents are shown as an avatar in a Mixed Reality environment and can interact with virtual content, users and other bots. They form a natural user interface where students can talk to the agent to get advice and it can also make autonomous decisions to guide the learning process. If the agent cannot answer a question, it can call a human mentor to join the conversation. This system considerably lowers the workload of the mentors while improving the mentoring experience of the students.