Creating tutoring characters through a Web-based authoring tool for educational software

Web-based education is particularly good for remote teaching and learning at any time and place, away from classrooms and without necessarily the presence of a human teacher. However, this independence from real teachers and classrooms may cause emotional problems to students who may feel deprived of the benefits of human-human interaction. In this paper we address this problem by rendering Web-based human-computer interaction more human-like. This is achieved by an authoring tool that human teachers may use to create their own educational software for their remote students. Through this authoring tool, human teachers may also create their own tutoring characters for the user interface of the educational application. These characters may be parameterised in many aspects, the way they speak, the pitch, speed and volume of their voice, their body-language and the content of their messages. In this way they may reflect the human teachers´ vision of teaching behaviour.