Provision of awareness of learners' emotions through visualizations in a computer interaction-based environment

One of the challenges of intelligent systems for education is to use low-level data collected in computer environments in the form of events or interactions to infer information with high-level significance using artificial intelligence techniques, and present it through visualizations in a meaningful and effective way. Among this information, emotional data is gaining track in by instructors in their educational activities. Many benefits can be obtained if an intelligent systems can bring teachers with knowledge about their learner's emotions, learning causes, and learning relationships with emotions. In this paper, we propose and justify a set of visualizations for an intelligent system to provide awareness about the emotions of the learners to the instructor based on the learners' interactions in their computers. We apply these learner's affective visualizations in a programming course at University level with more than 300 students, and analyze and interpret the student's emotional results in connection with the learning process.Work partially funded by the EEE project, ‘‘Plan Nacional de I+D+I TIN2011-28308-C03-01’’ and the ‘‘Emadrid: Investigación y desarrollo de tecnologías para el e-learning en la Comunidad de Madrid’’ project (S2009/TIC-1650)’’