Sérgio Gonçalves

Keystrokes and clicks : measuring stress on e-learning students

In traditional learning, teachers can easily get an insight into how their students work and learn and how they interact in the classroom. However, in online learning, it is more difficult for teachers to see how individual students behave. With the enormous growing of e-learning platforms, as complementary or even primary tool to support learning in organizations, monitoring students’ success factors becomes a crucial issue. In this paper we focus on the importance of stress in the learning process. Stress detection in an E-learning environment is an important and crucial factor to success. Estimating, in a non-invasive way, the students’ levels of stress, and taking measures to deal with it, is then the goal of this paper. Moodle, by being one of the most used e-learning platforms is used to test the log tool referred in this work.

t-books : merging traditional storybooks with electronics

In this paper, we describe the design process and a first pilot study of t-books, a toolkit consisting of an electronic platform, a book with slots on it and a set of picture cards that children place on the book to interact and explore the narrative. t-books was motivated by the wish to offer children an environment where they can play with the language elements, while engaging as story authors. In this process children can enlarge their vocabulary, experiment different storylines and learn to create meaningful sequences that evolve to a narrative. At the same time children can build their own story world by choosing among a diversity of different characters, settings and actions according to their needs and preferences, thus generating a simulation environment within the story universe, where alternative scenarios, and what-if questions can be posed and tested. A first insight of childrens interaction with t-books showed that children were highly motivated to create and share their own stories.

Peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers: an interface for playful language exploration

In this paper we describe t-words (tangible words) an interface that consists of rectangular blocks in which children can record and then playback audio. The blocks can then be snapped together playing the recorded audio in a sequence, by reordering the blocks in different ways the audio sequence changes according to the order of the blocks. t-words does not need a computer, which makes it flexible for various contexts. The interface was presented during two workshops that took place in Kathmandu - Nepal with two schools. During the workshops children used the interface playfully exploring sounds, words and sentences while engaging in collaborative work.

t-words: playing with sounds and creating narratives

We present t-words an interface for children to playful explore sounds, words and sentences while developing pre-literate skills. The interface consists of rectangular blocks in which children can record and then play the recorded audio. Additionally children can personalize the blocks by drawing on their surface. Children can engage in different literacy related activities such as building rhymes, playing with sounds and words as well as trying out different combinations of sentences while engaging in storytelling. Since the interface targets audio skills it may foster the development of phonological awareness and sensitiveness, helping to promote childrens early literacy.

Mental workload management as a tool in e-learning scenarios

In our daily life, we often have a sense of being exhausted due to mental or physical work, together with a feeling of performance degradation in the accomplishment of simple tasks. This is in part due to the fact that the working capacity and the performance of an individual, either physical or mental, generally decrease as the day progresses, although factors like motivation also play a significant role. These negative effects are especially significant when carrying out long or demanding tasks, as often happens in an educational context. In order to avoid these effects, initiatives to promote a good management of the time and effort invested in each task are mandatory. Such initiatives, when effective, can have a wide range of positive effects, including on the performance, productivity, attention and even mental health. Seeking to find a viable and realistic approach to address this problem, this paper presents a non-invasive and non-intrusive way to measure mental workload, one of the aspects that affects mental fatigue the most. Specifically, we target scenarios of e-learning, in which the professor may not be present to assess the students state. The aim is to create a tool that enables an actual management of fatigue in such environments and thus allows for the implementation of more efficient learning processes, adapted to the abilities and state of each student.

A Tangible Platform for Mixing and Remixing Narratives

This work discusses a tangible interface for storytelling that targets pre-school children and offers a playful experimental space where children can create their own narratives by placing tangible picture-blocks on an electronic board. We present the system and report on the findings, describing the extent to which this interface can motivate and engage children, both in creating narratives, as well as in experimenting different solutions to solve conflicts created during the story plot.

Detection of Behavioral Patterns for Increasing Attentiveness Level

In the current world, performance is one of the most important issues concerning work and competition. Performance is strongly connected with learning and when it comes to acquiring new knowledge, attention is one the most important mechanisms as the level of the learner’s attention affects learning results. When students are doing learning activities using new technologies, it is extremely important that the teacher has some feedback from the students’ work in order to detect potential learning problems at an early stage. The goal of this research is to propose a system that measures the level of attentiveness in real scenarios, and detects patterns of behavior associated to different attention levels among different students. This system measures attention and uses this information for training a decision support system that shows the level of attention of a group of students in real time.

Studying Stress on e-Learning Users

E-Learning, much like any other communication processes, has been significantly shaped by technological evolution. In its original form, e-Learning aimed to bring the education closer to people, making it more modular and personalized. However, in reality, we observe that it represents a separation between student and teacher, simplifying this relationship to the exchange of ”text-based messages”, leaving aside all the important contextual richness of the classroom. We are addressing this issue by devising a contextual layer for e-Learning platforms. Particularly, in this paper we describe a solution to convey information about the level of stress of the students so that the teacher can take better and more informed decisions concerning the management of the learning process.

Boosting Learning: Non-intrusive Monitoring of Student’s Efficiency

Keeping students interested and motivated is perhaps one of the most difficult and traditional tasks assigned to teachers. With technology being engaged increasingly into learning activities, with its advantages and disadvantages, some new aspects need to be considered. Undoubtedly, technology acts as an enhancer for learning, opening new paths for teaching. However there are some drawbacks too. Keeping students in the right track, doing what they are expected to do, with commitment and motivation, becomes an enormous challenge when an amazing digital world full of all kind of temptations is at the distance of their personal smartphones or even in the computer they use to study. This excess of stimuli and the process of switching and choosing between them has as potential effects on attention, stress and mental fatigue. Stressed or fatigued students fail to deliver the required performance for the task they are engaged in. This paper presents a non-intrusive approach for monitoring student’s performance in real time and measure the effect of these external variables on students. The long-term goal is to empower teachers with valuable information about the students’ state, allowing them to better manage their students and teaching methodologies.

Analysis of student's context in e-Learning

Traditionally, the Teacher-Student relationship is a close one. The student spends several hours of a day in the presence of the teacher and can talk, express doubts and pose questions. These doubts, or the general feeling towards the object of learning, are not only expressed explicitly but also implicitly. Indeed, the teacher is constantly, even if in an unconscious way, reading the state of the student in search for sings of doubt, frustration, stress or fatigue. This information is then used by the teacher to adapt their methods or to personalize their approach in function of each student. These aspects, intuitively central in education, become less efficient when learning takes place in a Virtual Environment. Indeed, the growth of online courses, in which the student and the teacher often never even meet, make learning more difficult for a number of reasons. In this paper we analyse these reasons and put forward an approach for inferring the students state that aims to minimize the effects of the absence of the teacher.