Development And Experiment Of Classroom Engagement Evaluation Mechanism During Real-Time Online Courses

Student engagement is an essential indicator of the quality of teaching. However, during real-time online classes, teachers are required to balance course content and observe students’ reactions simultaneously. Here, we aim to develop a web-based classroom evaluation system for teachers that evaluates student participation automatically. In this study, we present a novel mechanism that evaluates student participation based on multi-reaction. The system estimates students’ head poses and facial expressions through the camera and uses the estimation results as criteria for assessing student participation. Additionally, we conducted two evaluation experiments to demonstrate the system’s effectiveness in automatically evaluating student participation in a real-time online classroom environment with nine students. The instruction experiment was divided into head pose estimation, facial expression recognition, and multi-reaction estimation; the accuracy rates were 70.0%, 60.0%, and 80.0%, respectively. Although participants did not show many heads poses in the simulation classroom experiment, the system evaluated the classroom by assessing expression recognition, and 70% of the questions showed the same results as those of a questionnaire. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.