Addressing Emotions within E-Learning Systems

The Role of Emotions in Learning

There is growing recognition that emotions and affect play an important role in learning. The learning process is influenced by factors connected to the person, the task, and the context as well as the learner’s own on-going evaluation of the process itself. Situational characteristics and individual appraisals can trigger emotions (Efklides & Volet, 2005). In turn, as stated by Barrett and Salovey (2002), affect in learning facilitates the development of persistence and interest in a topic. Emotions can also influence learning through information processing activity and organization of recall (Pekrun, Goetz, Titz, & Perry, 2002). Furthermore, emotions can provide information about the learner’s own evaluation of the learning process, since they are linked to control- and value-related appraisals within a learning environment (Gläser-Zikuda & Mayring, 2003). For instance, positive emotions generally indicate that successful task control and interest have been experienced. Our learning, therefore, is heavily dependent on the emotional state we are in (LeDoux, 1998), and on the dynamic pattern of positive and negative emotions occurring in a given time period within a learning context (Sansone & Thoman, 2005).

The role of emotions can be relatively easily recognized and managed within face-to-face learning, where they have been shown to be significantly related to student motivation, learning strategies, cognitive resources, and achievement (Pekrun et al., 2002). What is worth considering is the role of emotions when students are remote from their teacher—even when computer-based education can be supported by a human tutor, the latter is likely to have a lesser awareness of the emotional state of students, and may thus more easily fail to provide a responsible teaching presence and appropriate leadership and direction (Wosnitza & Volet, 2005). Despite general awareness of the need to consider emotions in e-learning environments, it seems that, with the exception of computer anxiety, the emotions experienced during computer-based learning have not yet been analyzed in depth (Pekrun, 2005). Thus, there is a great need for e-learning projects to take the role of emotions in learning into account and to integrate this understanding into their pedagogical approach.