Merlin-know, an interactive virtual teacher for improving learning in Moodle

When teaching in university courses, one of the main problems is the students´ lack of motivation for everyday study. Learning management systems (LMS) provide a set of tools that students must handle to follow the course, but usually students need additional aid to effectively mastering these tools. We present here Merlin-Know, a new module for the Moodle LMS to help students do extra work and reviewing on-line. It is based on a virtual teacher who guides, motivates and encourages students. We also show two kinds of evaluation. First, the system was used for revising the activities of students along the semester. We conclude that Merlin-Know has a statistically positive influence on students´ learning outcomes, obtaining a positive correlation for all difficulty levels. Second, we conducted a usability evaluation to assess the acceptance by students´ and to detect ways of improvement. Average students said that Merlin-Know was useful and helped them to be more effective and productive, it was easy to learn and use and it has a friendly interface, and they easily remembered how to use it.