Pedagogical AI conversational agents in higher education: a conceptual framework and survey of the state of the art

Abstract The ever-changing global educational landscape, coupled with the advancement of Web3, is seeing rapid changes in the ways pedagogical artificially intelligent conversational agents are being developed and used to advance teaching and learning in higher education. Given the rapidly evolving research landscape, there is a need to establish what the current state of the art is in terms of the pedagogical applications and technological functions of these conversational agents and to identify the key existing research gaps, and future research directions, in the field. A literature survey of the state of the art of pedagogical AI conversational agents in higher education was conducted. The resulting…