MeetmEE: Engagement Estimation-based Online Meeting Room for Distance Learning

Learner engagement is associated with an essential inner state in a learning process for a successful learning outcome. Since learning shifted from traditional offline classrooms to distance learning, there is a need to provide different ways to assess a learner’s engagement. In this work-in-progress, we propose MeetmEE (pronounced as "meet me"), a framework to enhance synchronous distance learning by including automatic engagement estimation, where educator and learner interact in a one-on-one meeting through a video conference application. We optimized the advantages of Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) to develop an online meeting room through browsers and included the advanced automatic engagement estimation modules to recognize the learner engagement through facial expressions.

I. Introduction

Due to rapid developments in information and communications technology (ICT) and the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, learning shifted from traditional classroom settings to distance learning. Distance learning, including self-directed and online learning, has become to be seen as a major learning setting. Distance learning provides learners flexibilities to participate the learning synchronous learning (e.g., live communication) or asynchronous (e.g., through a learning management system (LMS)). This flexibility affects interaction, engagement, and motivation of the learners, as well as learning assessments. Therefore, affective behaviours, including boredom, frustration, confusion, and engagement, need to be assessed and monitored in different ways from traditional classroom.