A Collaboration Facilitator Model for Learning Virtual Environments

摘要

In virtual environments most pedagogical virtual tutors or facilitators supervise or guide the learning activity; they are task-oriented. In contrast, the here proposed facilitator is strictly about monitoring some aspects of collaboration and offering advice in this regard. In a multiuser virtual environment, that is, a Collaborative Virtual Environment, oral communication is chosen over written communication in order to enhance the feelings of presence, co-presence, and immersion for the user; but oral communication analysis presents a high resource overhead. As an alternative, the monitoring activity of this facilitator is based on two nonverbal cues of interaction: talking-turn patterns and object manipulation. An empirical study to validate this approach was conducted based on the participants’ perception regarding the suitability of the facilitator’s messages; the results showed that the students’ accepted a significant number of generated advice.