Josef Guggemos

This paper provides an overview of the current state of research on social robots in higher education and the existing frameworks to categorize and develop social robot applications. Based on the existing work, we present our own framework to develop use cases for social robots in the education sector. Our framework is based on a heuristic and symbiotic design approach that serves as a guideline for developing use cases and views human-robot interaction as two complementary and mutually reinforcing roles. We illustrate our framework by means of a use case that we have conducted in 2019 during the initial lecture of the large-scale course ‘Introduction to academic writing’.

Social robots are increasingly being used in education. They can take over various roles including teaching assistant, tutor, and novice. This chapter aims to provide a conceptual overview of the phenomenon. A classification of social robots is outlined; the criteria are: visual appearance, social capabilities, and autonomy and intelligence. The majority of robots used in education are humanoid; Nao from SoftBank Robotics is a quasi-standard type. An important social capability is empathy; a model illustrating how a robot can show empathy is discussed. A taxonomy is presented in order to capture the various degrees of robot autonomy. To achieve autonomy, artificial intelligence is necessary. This chapter advocates for a symbiotic design approach where tasks are collaboratively carried out by the teacher and the social robot, utilizing the complementary strength of both parties. This may be in line with the concept of hybrid intelligence. The ethical aspects of social robot use are explored, including privacy, control, responsibility, and the role of teachers. Moreover, the acceptance of social robots is discussed. Overall, attitudes towards social robots seem to be positive; however, there are also contrary findings. Finally, results are presented from a technology acceptance study with a sample of N = 462 university students from the social sciences. The chapter closes with suggestions for further research.

Covid-19 is increasingly forcing educational institutions to explore new avenues and weight the pros and cons between on-site instruction, online instruction, and mixed formats. Understanding teaching format preferences of lecturers may be helpful for creating meaningful solutions with educational technologies. The paper at hand documents and reflects on the organization and implementation of a large-scale first-semester course in Switzerland in the fall term 2020, where seminar lecturers were free to decide on their used course format (on-site, online, mixed). The format preferences of all 39 seminar lecturers were captured and evaluated. Our results indicate that seminar lecturers predominantly opted for mixed or online seminars; often they like to conduct the very first lesson on site for the purpose of becoming familiar with the students.