Instruction Through The Ages: Building Pervasive Virtual Instructors for Life Long Learning

A pervasive virtual instructor is an artificially intelligent instructor that may appear transparent to the learner or appear in the form of a three-dimensional graphical character, digital toy, or robot with capabilities to inhabit mixed reality environments, and provide personalized instruction anytime, anywhere, and at an-pace. Similarly to pedagogical agents, or traditional virtual instructors, pervasive virtual instructors are expected to behave autonomously, respond to human verbal/non-verbal input, and deliver information to human users. Unique to pervasive virtual instructors in this paper are capabilities to provide instruction across distributed networks, interact with human learners using context-aware intelligence, and apply empirically researched pedagogical/andragogical techniques. Technology challenges remain for building pervasive virtual instructors to achieve aforementioned capabilities. This paper summarizes technical challenges and an approach for building pervasive instructors that provide life long instructional services