The Use of Eye Tracking Technology in the Evaluation of e-Learning: A feasibility study (original) (raw)

Title: The Use of Eye Tracking Technology in the Evaluation of e- Learning: A feasibility study

Higher Education is increasingly relying on e-learning as a means of providing students with teaching and learning resources. Almost inevitably, this means that students interact with these learning resources through the medium of the computer screen. Although there have been significant advances in the design and implementation of online resources, exactly how students interact with these resources is a relatively new field of research. In this feasibility study students were asked to interact with a virtual learning environment, i.e. Blackboard, as well as Internet based resources, i.e. Ingenta and Wikipedia. Specifically, the students were asked to find the answer to a question provided, e.g. "what is classical conditioning?"or to locate a body of research related to a given topic, e.g. "theories of forgetting". As they searched for the information the eye movements of the students were recorded using a Tobii X50 eye tracking system. The data gathered was analysed dynamically, statistically, and graphically in order to identify search patterns and "hot spots" within the online information source. It was concluded that the use of eye tracking technology can provide the designers of online learning resources with an added dimension for the evaluation of their products and should be also be considered by tutors when developing their own online learning materials.

Identifying the effectiveness of e-learning platforms among students using Eye-Tracking technology

Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'18), 2018

The emergence of computers has led to a rapid evolution of the learning environment. In recent decades, new information and communication technology tools have contributed to major changes in learning. In this way, new forms of learning have emerged, such as learning in the virtual environment (e-learning). To support online education, it was necessary to develop a whole industry. Today there are a lot of products and services on the market from which you can choose the optimal solution. In this article were analyzed two of the elearning platforms within prestigious universities in Romania, in order to identify students' opinions about their existence, the degree of utility and usability they feel, and the possibilities for their improvement for a more good absorption among beneficiary students. The results have shown that elearning platforms are seen as a plus for the student, but there are still possibilities for improvement to catch up on the technologically advanced level.

A study on eye fixation patterns of students in higher education using an online learning system

Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge - LAK '16, 2016

We study how the use of online learning systems stimulate cognitive activities, by conducting an experiment with the use of eye tracking technology to monitor eye fixations of 60 final year students engaging in online interactive tutorials at the start of their Final Year Project module. Our findings show that the students' visual scanning behaviours fall into three different types of eye fixation patterns, and the data corresponding to the different types relates to the performance of the students in other related academic modules. We conclude that this method of studying eye fixation patterns can identify different types of learners with respect to cognitive activities and academic potentials, allowing educators to understand how their instructional design using online learning environments can stimulate higher-order cognitive activities.

Exploiting eye tracking in advanced e-learning systems

Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies - CompSysTech '12, 2012

This paper has a twofold purpose. First, it proposes a short review of e-learning systems directly or indirectly connected with eye tracking technology. Secondly, it describes the research we are currently carrying out at the University of Pavia whose main goal is the development of an e-learning platform in which eye data are exploited to obtain information about the student's "emotional" and "cognitive" states. The outcome of the preliminary tests presented in this work will be the starting point for further, more thorough experiments.

A case study of using eye tracking techniques to evaluate the usability of e-learning courses

Usability is an important quality indicator for interactive IT products, such as e-learning courses, and can directly impact learning effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. In this study, we use eye tracking method together with traditional interviewing and observing methods to evaluate and examine the functionality and usability of the homepage of an e-learning course. Through the use of eye tracking in the usability experiment, we learned finer points and developed confidence in our understanding about what drew attention and why on the course homepage, and by studying what people looked at and did not look at, we were able to glean more detailed insights about how the web user worked his or her way through usable and unusable designs. The integration usage of eye tracking with interviewing method produced strong corroborative results. It provided us with a richer interpretation than either technique alone. The findings from this report contribute to a broader process of iterative design and continuous development of e-learning course or e-learning applications functionality to be effective, efficient and satisfying for students.

Eye Tracking Applications for E-Learning Purposes

2019

E-learning has become a fundamental part of child education, higher education, and corporate training. In the design of adaptive e-learning environments, it is important to track and analyze learner behavior and preferences, and this is possible by recording their eye movements. Eye tracking is a technology developed to monitor eye movements allowing us to analyze the recorded gaze data. The main goal of this chapter is to determine the potential of eye tracking in the field of e-learning and the various applications of eye movement analysis for e-learning platforms. Results can be used to design an adaptive e-learning environment able to collect, analyze, and understand learner online behavior, preferences, and needs, and then offer an educational content adapted to each learner's needs by generating new customized learning situations.

Eye-tracking Techniques and Methods-Important Trends in e-Learning Environments

The research on eye movements has spread along with advances in eye-tracking technology and psychological theory on the relationship between eye behaviour and cognitive processes. This paper examines successful methods, measurements and rules intended for investigation on how eye movements could be related to cognitive processes during learning and tasks solving. A number of opportunities and contemporary challenges are considered, facing with the implementation of eye-tracking technologies and methods in the context of education. INTRODUCTION Eye-tracking technology includes a set of methods and techniques used to discover, identify and record the activities of eye movements. Significant enhancements over the past three decades in the development of eye-tracking systems have permitted researchers to attain more precise eye-gaze measurements with a reduced amount of obtrusive technologies [9]. In order to record eye movements throughout visual interaction or use gaze-based devices f...

Eye-tracking: regularities of educational information searching

2016

This work describes the results of research concerning patterns of students’ visual attention while searching answers using an educational source for a limited period of time. The eye-tracking technology was used to perform the experiment. The following aspects were found out: which part of an informational source attracts attention the most; the blind spots of the source; the differences in searching the information between humanity students and natural science students; the impact of using graphical material on execution of a task to solve. These findings may be used for creating the educational information source.

Assessing learning styles through eye tracking for e-learning applications

Computer Science and Information Systems

Adapting the presentation of learning material to the specific student?s characteristics is useful to improve the overall learning experience and learning styles can play an important role to this purpose. In this paper, we investigate the possibility to distinguish between Visual and Verbal learning styles from gaze data. In an experiment involving first year students of an engineering faculty, content regarding the basics of programming was presented in both text and graphic form, and participants? gaze data was recorded by means of an eye tracker. Three metrics were selected to characterize the user?s gaze behavior, namely, percentage of fixation duration, percentage of fixations, and average fixation duration. Percentages were calculated on ten intervals into which each participant?s interaction time was subdivided, and this allowed us to perform time-based assessments. The obtained results showed a significant relation between gaze data and Visual/Verbal learning styles for an ...

Eye-Tracking Student's Behaviour for E-Learning Improvement

EDULEARN19 Proceedings, 2019

Nowadays, there is a shift in society towards an increased use of technological aids, which help us in our daily life tasks. However, very little of these improvements are being used in the education system, specifically to help mitigate common academic problems that affect students, such as poor performance and disengagement issues, that can arise from identifiable symptoms like changes in behaviour and emotions. In this paper an architecture to handle eye tracker data is presented, which analyses the gaze data, captured from students in learning scenarios to predict specific behaviours and issues. A scenario where distractive stimuli was used to emulate deviations in the attention levels is presented. A methodology was defined able to detect gaze patterns for further automatization of the detection of students' issues as lack of attention and performance. The goal is in the near future to provide Learning Management Systems with solutions able to present insightful real time cognitive data of the users and automatically detect if they are exhibiting any low performance and automatically react.