Developing the Petal E-Learning Platform for Facial Analytics and Personalized Learning

Abstract

Learning analytics is targeted to better understand each learner’s interests and characteristics in order to build a personalized and smart learning environment. However, many learning analytics techniques are computationally intensive, thus inappropriate for any mobile application. In this chapter, a mobile and smart e-learning platform named the Personalized teaching and learning (PETAL) system is proposed and facilitated by an intelligent facial analytics algorithm running on any mobile device to quickly estimate the learner’s responses through continuously monitoring the individual’s attention spans, facial orientation, and eye movements while viewing online course materials such as some educational videos. To protect each individual’s data privacy, the learner profile is stored under a password-protected account on a cloud server with all the intermediate data to be erased after completing a learning task. This work represents the first attempt to successfully develop an intelligent and personalized learning environment facilitated by an efficient facial analytics algorithm that can be run on any mobile device. To demonstrate its feasibility, a prototype of the PETAL e-learning system is built with the open source computer vision library to detect the learner’s responses to some educational videos. With the capability of notifying the learners of their, possibly unconscious, reactions to such educational videos, the platform is targeted to promote a truly personalized and smart learning environment through learning analytics techniques. Clearly, there are many promising directions in terms of both pedagogical and technological impacts to enhance the mobile PETAL platform for the next-generation e-learning systems.