Digital tuition: Light up to ask a question!

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Lately, a rather unusual student has been taking his seat in LMU’s auditoriums: His eye is an HD camera, his ear a directional microphone. And if he wants to ask a question, an LED ring lights up. This minimalist robot, which can also change its face and is rolled into the lecture theater, is part of a cooperative project between informatics and psychology researchers at LMU. Its aim is to help improve the quality of hybrid tuition.

“Distance learning gained popularity during the coronavirus pandemic,” explains LMU computer scientist Dr. Daniel Ullrich, whose main area of research is human-robot interaction. “Hybrid tuition – a mix of being in the classroom and learning online – presents a host of benefits for students who are traveling or are ill, for example, or for those with family responsibilities.” However, customary online formats lack direct contact and nonverbal communication with remote students. Moreover, interaction based on text-based chat functions are both impersonal and add to the mental strain on lecturers, who have to keep a close eye on students who are physically present and those who are following online at the same time.

Ullrich’s colleague Professor Andreas Butz,holder of the Chair of Human-Machine Interaction at LMU, knows the problem: “You come into conflict as a lecturer because you can never do justice to both groups to the same extent.” The two computer scientists thus put their heads together to look for a technological solution – and hit on the idea of placing a physical representative of the online students in the auditorium. In this way, they sought to map the principle of ‘telepresence robots’, which can already be found sitting around conference tables in the corporate sector, onto the context of university teaching. The avatar represents all students who are attending the lecture online.

Students get involved in developing an avatar

Sarah Diefenbach, Professor of Business Psychology and Human-Technology Interaction, is also involved in the project. “From a psychological perspective, the feeling of social integration also plays an important part in creating a healthy teaching atmosphere,” the researcher says. This isn’t the first time she has tackled the subject of robotics in cooperation with the computer scientists: “If the remote students are more present in the physical auditorium, that can encourage them to get more actively involved, ask questions and have their say.”

As part of Daniel Ullrich’s internship on ‘Experience Design’, students initially developed concepts of what the avatar might look like. Subsequently presented in the psychology and media informatics courses, the designs ranged “from minimalist to heavily humanoid”, Ullrich recalls. “One of the early ideas was to have an anthropomorphic robot with a body similar to that of a human that would sit alongside the other students in the lecture theater and raise its arm if it had a question.” The researcher continues: “However, the many mechanical components of this concept make it error-prone in practice.” Many students were also uneasy at the thought of having a humanoid avatar form. “If an animated figure or robot comes very close to what humans look like,” Ullrich explains, “you sometimes find yourself in what is called ‘uncanny valley’, where a near-human appearance is paradoxically perceived as negative.”

In contrast, the avatar that was ultimately built as a ‘final prototype’ has geometric lines, is transparent and is about the same size as a seated student. A notebook display has been fitted into the front of its cuboid, acrylic glass body. At any given moment, the display shows only the individual remote student who wants to ask a question. “This picks up on the well-established concepts used in Zoom communication.”
The robot lights up discreetly in different colors to indicate its status: Red is an error message, for example, while green indicates active speech.

Well-suited to PowerPoint lectures

For the purpose of real-time communication, lecturers and students alike use videoconferencing software, controlling the avatar’s sensors and actuators via a React app, a web-based user interface. When an LED ring lights up, the avatar thus shows that one of the remote students has a question. With a view to enabling remote students to also engage with other students in the room when questions are asked, the researchers are now experimenting with a 360-degree camera. “A lot of the students physically in the room had concerns about their privacy, however,” Ullrich concedes. “They didn’t want to be filmed and would sit in the very back rows of the auditorium.”

To make sure it can be heard clearly all around the room, the avatar is usually placed in the second or third row. Its volume when asking questions or making comments adapts automatically to the noise level in the auditorium. A directional microphone with an automated sound level also ensures that even lecturers with quiet voices are clearly audible to remote students. “One slight drawback is that, when the lecture theater is completely quiet, you can even hear someone rustling a piece of paper.”

Within the framework of one student’s master’s thesis in informatics, the remote student avatar is currently also being tried out in other contexts, such as in veterinary medicine, educational tuition and art history. “As we have seen, it works particularly well in classic lecturing scenarios where someone writes on the board or delivers PowerPoint presentations,” Ullrich says. “On the other hand, the system reaches its limits whenever an artefact or a practical example is shown.” Nor is it always suitable for large groups of students who engage in lively discussions: “In one psychology lecture, for example, half of the 130 participants were attending online,” Ullrich says. “When they began engaging in debate, the screen became very cluttered and unmanageable.”

Faces, not black squares

Computer scientist Butz admits that the remote student avatar is still an ‘unpolished prototype’ that needs further development. The team is working to improve the recognition of slides, artefacts and experiments, especially on split screens. Very practical aspects of the university routine likewise need to be optimized: “We still have some developmental steps to go before the ‘remote student’ can be folded away and carried around in a case, popped up in a lecture theater and activated at the push of a button, for example,” Butz notes.

That said, the avatar has succeeded in creating a new and more personal communication channel for remote students – an approach that was rewarded with the “LMU Teaching Innovation Prize” on the university’s Good Teaching Day. Many lecturers had the impression that they were able to forge stronger links with remote students thanks to the avatar,” Ullrich explains. “And I myself was surprised at how naturally this form of dialogue worked in the lecture theater.” One reason, he muses, is perhaps that the students now have a face – rather than the anonymous ‘black squares’ used in conventional formats.