We present results of a randomized controlled study that compared different types of affective messages delivered by pedagogical agents. We used animated characters that were empathic and emphasized the malleability of intelligence and the importance of effort. Results showed significant correlations between students who received more…

Characterizing the nature of students' affective and emotional states and detecting them is of fundamental importance in online course platforms. In this paper, we study this problem by using discussion forum posts derived from large open online courses. We find that posts identified as encoding confusion are actually manifestations of different…