E-learning system design with humor and empathy interaction by virtual human to improve students’ learning

Abstract

Students’ affections have a significant impact on motivation and learning performance. Many researches revealed that humor has a great effect on students’ learning motivation and emotion. And some researchers thought empathy can increase students’ interests and self-efficiency and ease off negative emotions. Therefore, we try to add several emoticons into e-learning system to capture learners’ emotions and design a humorous and empathic virtual human to respond to learners’ emotions at proper moments. In this paper, we had done a preliminary experiment which showed the virtual human with humor and empathy can enhance learners’ motivation, learning performance, and ease learners’ emotions.