Scripted Vicarious Dialogues: Educational Video Augmentation Method for Increasing Isolated Students' Engagement

Videos are convenient resources for asynchronous learning, but they lack interpersonal interactions found in synchronous classrooms. Due to missed social connectedness, the isolated video-based learners experience low emotional, behavioral, and cognitive engagement. This work presents "Scripted Vicarious Dialogues" (SVD), a technique for engaging students in a pseudo-social experience of witnessing scripted dialogues between virtual characters (teaching assistants and students) around a video. We conducted a participatory design study to derive design guidelines for SVD. The findings indicate the need to distinguish the virtual components and to give students control of the dialogue’s pace. We then implemented an interactive prototype of SVD and evaluated it (N=40) against a non-social, direct-learning baseline. The results show that the preference for SVD versus the baseline is polarized (25 of 40 preferred SVD; no neutral preferences), and those who preferred SVD had significantly higher emotional and behavioral engagement with SVD compared to the baseline.