Investigating the Value of Using Emotionally Intelligent Artificial Conversational Agents to Carry out Assessments in Higher Education: Review

Abstract

The Viva (Oral Examination) is a crucial assessment method in higher education field to evaluate students on their work. In the typical setting of Viva, the learner and the assessor benefit from carrying out extremely adapted assessment taking opportunity to have a unique and deep insight into learner's knowledge and understanding. As the interaction with human examiners in Viva assessment can cause a considerable level of anxiety to the students, usage of conversational agents is emerging in the education domain. Hence, intelligent conversational agents will be an innovative, practical, and interactive tool which may help to reduce the level of tension caused by the traditional Viva mechanism. In this paper, we review the usage of artificial intelligent conversational agents in different businesses, looking at interaction modality, uses and recommended design rules. Additionally, we study the aspects: usability, interactivity, learnability, and reliability of the agents used in different domains to investigate the value of using them to carry out assessments in higher education. Furthermore, we compare between related frameworks in terms of utilizing web-based implementation, source code availability and use of Wizard-of-Oz techniques.