Use of a digital assistant in student group work

Title: Use of a digital assistant in student group work

Partner: Dresden University of Technology

Project duration: 9/2021 - 9/2022

Funding: Center for Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching (ZiLL)

Methods: Qualitative interviews, (online) experiments, Quantitative questionnaires, Descriptive multifactorial multivariate analyses.

Summary:
Learning is an extraordinarily individual process. Particularly in a large heterogeneous student body, tailored support for strengths of individuals or groups requires a great deal of supervision. Students have individual levels of knowledge and learning modalities (possibly due to childcare, part-time jobs, or the like), making selective and time-independent support necessary. For a successful and independent learning process of each participant, individualized support is therefore desirable. 
Digital assistants offer the possibility of individual and unlimited use and can thus improve the teaching and learning experience of students and teachers. For this reason, such a digital assistant will be tested in interaction with or between students in seminar groups in order to derive general design principles and functionalities for the broad use of technology in the teaching context.

Approach:
To obtain a comprehensive picture of what is needed, the following steps will be taken:
- Workshops with students and teachers
- Theoretical derivation of different forms of interaction and design
- Programming of different prototypes including experimental testing
- Statistical analysis of the results and correlations and publication of the results
- Development of the digital assistant and an interface to the students

Contact: Digital Work Research Group (DWRG)