Affective Didactic Models in Higher Education

In designing a course a teacher defines the educational goals, selects the teaching material and the way of assessment and finally defines a didactic model. In this didactic model the teacher defines his way of teaching taking into account the different ways of learning. Students starting an academic study interact with the educational or teaching learning environment. Students define their own study goals, they are supposed to have the right capabilities to finish the study successfully and are able to set themselves into action. But an important driving force is the affective component. Successful students like their study, enjoy their life at the university and interactions with fellow students but are afraid to fail for exams, dislike the aloneness, angry at failing systems. In this paper, we present well-known and new didactic models with special attention for affective components. We present a system to assess the emotional state of students. The system has been tested using a management game, where a crisis team composed of students reduce the negative impact of flooding in the city of Prague. The results of the experiment are described in this paper.