Towards Webcam-Based Face Direction Tracking to Detect Learners' Attention Within Asynchronous E-Learning Environment

Abstract

Abstract. Recently, as a consequence of COVID-19 pandemic, the delivery of education at most of the educational institutions depended mainly on e-learning. So, the researchers give more attention for both synchronous and asynchronous e-learning. Although from an economical perspective, asynchronous e-learning seems to be the best e-learning option for institutions, still one of the biggest challenges is how to keep learners motivated for the entire learning process. One of important motivational factors that drives the success of the learning process is the learner attention. Therefore, to retain the learners' attention during the asynchronous e-learning process, we need first to detect their loss of attention. Accordingly, more studies started to focus on detecting learners’ attention. However, those studies can't be widely used for attention detection within asynchronous e-learning environments, as the used approaches tend to be inaccurate, and complex for the design and maintain. In contrast, in this study, we explore the possibility to find a simple way that can be widely used to detect learners' attention within the asynchronous e-learning environments. Therefore, we used webcams which are available in almost every laptop, and computer vision tools to detect learners' attention by tracking their faces. Thereafter, we evaluated the accuracy of our suggested method, the result of this evaluation showed that our method is efficient.

Students’ Perceptions towards the Role of Online Teaching Platforms in Enhancing Online Engagement and Academic Performance Levels in Palestinian Higher Education Institutions

“…Research has shown that planning for meaningful interaction is essential for maintaining engagement in online learning. Ramaha and Karas [42] suggested the use of an interactive avatar for asynchronous e-learning systems that can detect students' motivation, maintain engagement, provide feedback, reward performance, provide different levels of difficult tasks, praise efforts, encourage persistence, and provide assistance. Understanding how students access, attend, and participate in online classes is also crucial for improving their academic success.…”

Identification of the Problems Faced by Students Due to Online Education

“…These factors destroy the disciplinary lifestyle of the students and lack advanced online tools that decrease their interest in any kind of physical activity in comparison to other previous decades. The shift in the online learning process and another advancement in teaching tools change the course structures rapidly which sometimes decreases the quality of the4 learning process [13]. Besides that, the online education system has fewer opportunities for speciality-abled children which negatively impacts the online educational structure.…”

An Intelligent Tutoring System to Maintain the Students’ Motivation

“…Within the traditional classroom and synchronous online education the teacher communicate simultaneously with the students, hence he/she can assist the students' motivation and interact with them to maintain their motivation. Therefore, the asynchronous online educational systems need to interact with the students to maintain their motivation (Keller and Suzuki, 2004;Ramaha, Karaş, Gül, Bozkurt, and Yayvan, 2021;Hartnett, 2016). To maintain the motivation of the students', the asynchronous online educational system needs to execute two functions: (1) detect students' motivational state, (2) respond to the students' motivational state to maintain it.…”