Feedback Design in Multimodal Dialogue Systems

This paper discusses the design and development of the instructional aspects of a multimodal dialogue system to train youth parliament members’ presentation and debating skills. Real-time, in-action feedback informs learners on the fly how they perform key skills and enables them to adapt instantly. About-action feedback informs learners after finishing a task how they perform key skills and enables them to monitor their progress and adapt accordingly in subsequent tasks. In- and about-action feedback together support the enhancement of the learners’ metacognitive skills, such as self-monitoring, self-regulation and self-reflection thus reflect in- and about action. We discusses the theoretical considerations of the feedback, the type of data available and different ways to analyse and combine them, the timing of feedback and, finally, provide an instructional design blueprint giving a global outline of a set of tasks with stepwise increasing complexity and the feedback proposed. We conclude with the results of the first experiment with the system focussing on non-verbal communication skills.