Physiological Measurement on Students' Engagement in a Distributed Learning Environment

Measuring students’ engagement in a distributed learning environment is a challenge. In particular, a teacher gives a lecture at one location, while at the same time the remote students watch the lecture through a display screen. In such situation, it is difficult for the teacher to know the reaction at the remote location. In this paper, we conducted a field study to measure students’ engagement by using galvanic skin response (GSR) sensors, where students simultaneously watched the lecture at the two locations. Our results showed the students’ GSR response was aligned with the surveys, which means that during a distributed learning environment, GSR sensors can be used as an indicator on students’ engagement. Furthermore, our user studies resulted in non-engaging student learning experiences that would be difficult obtained at a lab condition. Based on the findings, we found that the patterns of GSR readings were rather different when compared to the previous relevant studies, where users were engaged. In addition, we noticed that the density of GSR response at the remote location was higher when compared to the one at the lecture room. We believe that our studies are beneficial on physiological computing, as we first presented the patterns of GSR sensors on non-engaging user experiences. Moreover, as an alternative method, GSR sensors can be easily implemented in a distributed learning environment to provide feedback to teachers.