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.