Towards a Low-Cost Teacher Orchestration Using Ubiquitous Computing Devices for Detecting Student’s Engagement

Abstract

The ubiquitous devices and technologies to support teachers and students in a learning environment include the Internet of things (IoT), learning analytics (LA), augmented or virtual reality (AR/VR), ubiquitous learning environment (ULE), and wearables. However, most of these solutions are obtrusive, with substantial infrastructure costs and pseudo-real-time results. Real-time detection of students’ activeness, participation, and activity monitoring is important, especially during a pandemic. This research study provides a low-cost teacher orchestration solution with real-time results using off-the-shelf devices. The proposed solution determines a teacher’s activeness using multimodal data (MMD) from both teacher and student’s devices. The MMD extracts different features from data, decodes them, and displays them to the instructor in real time. It allows the instructor to update their teaching methodology in real time to get more students on board and provide a more engaging learning experience. Our experimental results show that real-time feedback about the classroom’s current status helped improve learning outcomes by about 45%. Also, we investigated a 50% increase in classroom engaging experience.