The Missing Piece of Online Learning: AI Robots as Virtual Classmates
The Challenge: Online education often struggles with low student engagement and completion rates, largely due to the lack of dynamic, real-time interaction found in physical classrooms.
The Solution: Artificial Intelligence, the Missing Piece of Online Education? published in IEEE EMBC by a team including authors associated with MobLab, proposes a powerful solution: Artificial Intelligence (AI) robotic players to drive engagement in asynchronous, online courses.
How AI Robots Revolutionize Economic Education:
Mastering Markets: Students can join virtual markets populated by hyper-rational trading robots that constantly arbitrage. This forces human students to learn how to compete optimally, bringing abstract concepts of supply, demand, and equilibrium to life.
Realistic Human Behavior: The robots can be trained using real-world behavioral data (like the data found in MobLab’s extensive library) to mimic human players. For example, a robot in the Ultimatum Game can be programmed to anticipate and deliver a spiteful rejection to an unfair offer, teaching students about non-rational human social behavior.
Cultural Experience: By training robots on behavioral data from different countries and regions, students can indirectly experience how cultural norms influence economic decision-making across the globe.
The Significance: By using AI to create these realistic, interactive virtual partners, educators can effectively "bridge the last mile" between online convenience and the deep, experiential learning benefits of the classroom.