Abstract

Virtual worlds are rapidly gaining acceptance in educational settings; with bots play an important role in these environments to help learners. Authentic learning can be significantly supported by bots to help self-guided learning in authentic tasks. In this paper, we investigate what is stopping educators from making more use of bots as a valuable resource. We seek the expertise of six educators, who used educational bots, to find an answer to this question.. While they have ‘big plans’ for bot use, the current implementations are ‘low-level’ and restrictive in their application. There is further confusion about appropriate pedagogical models and how to use them effectively as more than ‘prompters’ or ‘extras’. While creation and control technologies are advancing, allowing use of bots as a ‘hard technology’ to guide learners through routine procedures; there is a lack of resources for automation as intelligence technologies are slower to develop and may require future partnerships with external parties before they are available useable by general educators.