Towards Gamified Conversational Agents for Self-Regulated Learning in Digital Education

Formal education like higher education oftentimes emphasized on strict non-digital setting. This approach can lead to issues during stressful times (e.g., Covid crisis) or when learners’ needs in general are not considered. Moreover, these times highlighted how important self-regulated learning is and how much this capability is lacking in our educational system. To address these issues, we follow an Action Design Research approach and develop a gamified conversational agent (CA) that considers the learners’ needs. We present our CA and conduct a first small-scale evaluation following a mixed-method approach. First results show that students universally liked a CA for self-regulated digital learning and many enjoyed the gamified experience which helped students to be motivated to learn. As next steps we will develop the next iteration of our CA and conduct a long-term field test at a university.