Evaluation of e-learners’ concentration using recurrent neural networks

Recently, interest in e-learning has increased rapidly owing to the lockdowns imposed by COVID-19. A major disadvantage of e-learning is the difficulty in maintaining concentration because of the limited interaction between teachers and students. The objective of this paper is to develop a methodology to predict e-learners’ concentration by applying recurrent neural network models to eye gaze and facial landmark data extracted from e-learners’ video data. One hundred eighty-four video data of ninety-two e-learners were obtained, and their frame data were extracted using the OpenFace 2.0 toolkit. Recurrent neural networks, long short-term memory, and gated recurrent units were utilized to predict the concentration of e-learners. A set of comparative experiments was conducted. As a result, gated recurrent units exhibited the best performance. The main contribution of this paper is to present a methodology to predict e-learners’ concentration in a natural e-learning environment.