E-Learning with Affective Tutoring Systems

E-learning has attracted a great deal of interest in educational circles from K-12 to universities. A question that is often rightly asked is how effective current e-learning systems are. It is argued that there is little individualization of instruction by adapting to the pedagogical needs of each learner in current e-learning systems. Intelligent tutoring systems have tried to fill this gap but even they fail to compete with human one-to-one tutoring. This paper presents Affective Tutoring Systems which are e-learning systems capable of detecting learners’ affective state and reacting to it through a life like agent called Eve. This paper presents an Affective Tutoring System in the domain of mathematics and the research that led to its development. It also presents the findings from the study and testing of the system indicating that the animated agent Eve carried a persona effect.