Educational Agent's Roles and Learning

Educational agents are screen characters who can influence learners’ learning by playing different roles; this way, it has become one of the topics in the field of instructional technology and can be used in teaching various sciences as medicine. This study sought to identify the different roles that educational agents take on and their impact on learning outcomes and learner’s behaviors.

This study systematically examines the studies related to the roles of the educational agent and their impact during the years 2010 to 2019 in Science Direct, Springer, Google Scholar and IEEEXplore databases by accurately and systematically identifying them. As to the selection of articles, only English articles based on an experimental study were examined. The keywords educational agent and pedagogical agent have been used to find articles.

Based on the search strategy, 126 articles were obtained and after deleting the items that could not be accessed to the article full text and the abstract did not contain complete information, or was not related to the questions of this study, 30 articles were reviewed. Findings revealed that educational agents in different situations take on different roles such as coach, specialist, facilitator, motivator, feedback, so on, and these roles have a positive effect on learners' learning and behaviors.

The educational factor can have a positive effect on learning as well as learners' behaviors by adapting various roles such as feedback, motivator, facilitator, instructor, so on Accordingly, to develop e-learning environments, it seems indispensable to use educational agents to improve the quality of learning.