Extended use of personal factors in adaptive e-learning environments: Moods in MOOC’s

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC’s) are a new kind of e-Learning environment, which enables us to address untold numbers of students. MOOC’s allow students all over the world to participate in lectures independent of place and time. The sessions that are in some cases joined by more than 100.000 students are based on small units of teaching material containing videos or texts. However today’s MOOC’s are static environments, which do not take into account the diversity of the students and their situational context. Current MOOC’s can be seen as mass processing but not as an individual treatment of individual students. Thus MOOC’s need to be personalized in addition to massive. In order to personalize an e-Learning environment it is first necessary to collect data, or personal factors, about the student, his or her current environment and his or her situational context. This data should later be processed and used as input for adaptive functions. Basically there are many input factors imaginable, such as cognitive style, preknowledge, currently used device or personal goals. The input factors can be grouped into technical, personal and situational factors. Especially situational factors may help to support students in different learning situations. This paper describes an approach to detect the student’s current mood as a situational input factor. The mood of a student in a learning situation might be an interesting feature that can be used as an instant feedback for the currently used teaching materials. The proposed approach is based on widespread availability of built-in cameras in devices that are used by students, such as smart-phones, tablets or laptop computers. The captured frames from these devices are processed by various algorithms for preprocessing, face detection, segmentation and classification. The classification algorithm operates on a large database of faces with basic emotional expressions that is used to determine the student’s current mood from the captured frame. The output of the system may be used to adjust the difficulty level of tests or to determine the preferred media type.