A Case Study on e-Learners Perception and Kansei Experience towards Pedagogical Virtual Agents

The emergence of Web 5.0 technologies has made educators to think of pedagogical virtual agents as an effective e-learning tool. Since the success of an e-learning tool relies mainly on the acceptable level of the tool by the e-Learners and their state of emotion while using the tool, it is important to address the e-Learner’s emotional competencies. The present study examined the impact of pedagogical virtual agents, as operationalized by agent’s demographic features, e-Learners’ perceptions on virtual agents and their Kansei experience. 95 university freshmen from a private higher learning institution participated in this research. Consistent with similarity-attraction hypothesis, attraction-realism hypothesis, and Kansei Experience- hypothesis, it was found that: (1) e-Learners assigned higher ratings for pedagogical agents who have many similar demographic features as them, (2) e-Learners reported higher positive emotion ratings for attractive virtual agents, (3) there is a positive and significant relationship between the attractiveness of the pedagogical virtual agent and the realistic appearance of the agent. Some implications of this research are discussed in this paper.