Physiological Measurement on Students’ Engagement In a Distributed Learning Environment

Measuring students’ engagement in a distributed learning environment is a challenge. In particular, a teacher gives a lecture at one location, while at the same time the remote students watch the lecture through a display screen. In such situation, it is difficult for the teacher to know the reaction at the remote location. In this paper, we conducted a field study to measure students’ engagement by using galvanic skin response (GSR) sensors, where students simultaneously watched the lecture at the two locations. Our results showed the students’ GSR response was aligned with the surveys, which means that during a distributed learning environment, GSR sensors can be used as an indicator on students’ engagement. Furthermore, our user studies resulted in non-engaging student learning experiences that would be difficult obtained at a lab condition. Based on the findings, we found that the patterns of GSR readings were rather different when compared to the previous relevant studies, where users were engaged. In addition, we noticed that the density of GSR response at the remote location was higher when compared to the one at the lecture room. We believe that our studies are beneficial on physiological computing, as we first presented the patterns of GSR sensors on non-engaging user experiences. Moreover, as an alternative method, GSR sensors can be easily implemented in a distributed learning environment to provide feedback to teachers

Investigating the effect of relative time delay on companion screen experiences

Mobile devices are increasingly used while watching television, leading to the development of companion apps that complement the content of programmes. A concern for these applications is the extent to which companion app and television content need to be temporally aligned for live synchronisation. In this study, 18 participants watched a nature programme while being shown companion content on a tablet. Temporal synchronisation of content between the devices was varied. Participants completed questionnaires measuring immersion and affect and were tested on their recall for companion app content. While there were no statistically significant effects on these measures, qualitative interviews with participants after viewing consistently revealed that longer 10s delays in content synchronisation were frustrating. This suggests that poor content synchronisation can produce a negative companion experience for viewers and should be avoided

Quantifying the effects of temperature and noise on attention-level using EDA and EEG sensors

Most people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) experience atypical sensory modality and need help to self-regulate their sensory responses. Results of a pilot study are presented here where temperature, noise types and noise levels are used as independent variables. Attention-based tests (ABTs), Electrodermal Activity (EDA) and Electroencephalography (EEG) sensors are used as dependent variables to quantify the effects of temperature and noise. Based on the outcome of the analyses, it is feasible to use off-the-shelf sensors to recognize physiological changes, indicating a possibility to develop sensory management recommendation interventions to support people with ASD

Video-based collaborative learning:evidence for a pedagogical model

The educational potential of video is a long-lasting, multi-faceted topic, and the affordances of technological advancement have recently revitalized this discussion. However, teachers are still far from competently integrating or becoming accustomed to video-based pedagogy, especially in combination with collaborative pedagogy. To provide teachers and teacher educators with sound principles for implementing video-supported collaborative learning (VSCL), this symposium fosters a teacher experiment, a cross-over analysis on a pedagogical model for effective VSCL, and student feedback in relation with VSCL. The experiment shows students’ growing lexical richness and cohesion by working peer feedback on student’s video recorded teaching practice. The cross-over analysis shows the evidence for the VSCL-pedagogical model based on data from many other experiments in the European ViSuAL-project. The same holds for the student-feedback analysis. In this symposium we interact about practical experiences in relation with the effective principles of the developed pedagogical model and the experiences of the students