Effect of Embodiment of Video Instructor on Student’s Learning Process

Faculty members are often busy with various research work and thus have little time to prepare lectures. Advances in technology offer a solution to this problem. That is, they can record the lectures and reuse them over semesters. It is common for these lecture videos to include an inset frame of the instructor giving the lecture. However, little research has been done to investigate the effect of these inset frames. In this study, we examined how the physical embodiment of the instructor in the inset frame impacts the learning process. Three types of embodiment were compared through an online between-participants experiment: lecture with no inset frame, lecture with an inset frame of a human instructor and lecture with an inset frame of a virtual agent instructor. The results showed a marginally significant difference between having some form of embodiment and having no embodiment in terms of learning performance.