Exploiting human signals in learning environment as an alternative to evaluate education performance

Abstract

There is a demand for new ways to understand the relation between student and group behaviour, and their impact on education performance. For that, we are researching, developing, and testing technologies to instrument classrooms, collect human signal data, and derive meaning that leads us to understand their relation with the education performance. We call this setup as "the Smarter Classroom". It integrates (i) applications running on tablet computing devices that play digital education content and collect students' gestures whilst manipulating the materials, (ii) environmental sensors such as video cameras and microphones, and (iii) innovative Analytics models that can make sense of these signals. In this work, we describe our development, present a practical experiment, and discuss the field applicability of this technology.