Behind the Screens: Exploring Eye Movement Visualization to Optimize Online Teaching and Learning
Marian Sauter, Tobias Wagner, Teresa Hirzle, Bao Xin Lin, Enrico Rukzio, Anke Huckauf
The effective delivery of e-learning depends on the continuous monitoring and management of student attention. While instructors in traditional classroom settings can easily assess crowd attention through gaze cues, these cues are largely unavailable in online learning environments. To address this challenge, the authors collected eye movement data from twenty students and developed four visualization methods: (a) a heat map, (b) an ellipse map, (c) two moving bars, and (d) a vertical bar, which were overlaid on 13 instructional videos. Contrary to expectations, instructors did not prefer the established heat map and vertical bar for live online instruction. Instead, they chose the less intrusive ellipse visualization. The heat map remained the preferred choice for retrospective analysis due to its more detailed information. All visualizations were found to be useful and to help restore emotional connections in online learning.
online teachinggaze visualization