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Humanoid robots in higher education: Evaluating the acceptance of Pepper in the context of an academic writing course using the UTAUT
Author(s) -
Guggemos Josef,
Seufert Sabine,
Sonderegger Stefan
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
british journal of educational technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.79
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1467-8535
pISSN - 0007-1013
DOI - 10.1111/bjet.13006
Subject(s) - humanoid robot , robot , psychology , context (archaeology) , structural equation modeling , social robot , applied psychology , unified theory of acceptance and use of technology , artificial intelligence , mathematics education , social psychology , computer science , social influence , machine learning , mobile robot , robot control , paleontology , biology
This study investigates the acceptance of social robots by higher education students in the social sciences. Pepper, a humanoid social robot from SoftBank Robotics, provided a sample of its capabilities during a first semester, large‐scale, university course, “Introduction to academic writing.”From this course, 462 freshmen participated in our survey. The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) acts as the conceptual framework, and partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS‐SEM) as the method for data analysis. The four perceived characteristics—trustworthiness, adaptiveness, social presence and appearance—all predict the intention to use the robot for learning purposes; anxiety regarding making mistakes in handling the robot and about privacy issues are not significant predictors. An importance‐performance map analysis indicated adaptiveness as the robot’s most important characteristic for predicting student behavioural intention. Overall, however, the study shows that students do not have the intention to rely on social robots for learning purposes at the current level of state‐of‐the‐art technology: behavioural intention reaches only 36.6% of the theoretical maximum.