New Trends in Pedagogical Agents in Education

A pedagogical agent is an anthropomorphic virtual character used in an online learning environment for educational purposes. Pedagogical Agents fulfill a variety of educational purposes, for which they can have a high degree of adaptability, be very versatile, enable highly realistic simulations, focus on socio-cultural requirements of students, as well as having the ability to foster commitment, motivation and responsibility as well as improve learning and performance of cognitive subjects. In this work, we review the literature on Pedagogical Agents in order to identify and analyze them, as well as to evaluate the impact of the implementation of these systems in the field of pedagogy, considering also the different elements that they incorporate, such as: text, voice, 2D and 3D images, and human figures. The factors that drive the demands of new characteristics, functionalities and socio-cultural environments for the development of contemporary pedagogical agents are analyzed.