Augmenting MOOC videos with teachers' gaze
© 2014 EPFL
What if we could see what teachers are looking at while they’re explaining the content?
We know from research that speakers gaze at the objects they refer to just before pointing and verbally naming the objects. Listeners on the other hand, look at the referred objects shortly after seeing the speaker point and refer to the objects. Displaying the speakers’ gaze to the listeners could help them better attend to references, which in turn could enhance their understanding.
The Center for Digital Education at EPFL has recorded one lesson by Jérôme Chenal from the course “African cities: an introduction to urban planning” while he was wearing a pair of mobile eye-tracking glasses. Have a look at minute 2:29 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqV-RbCeFs8) where you'll see the teacher's gaze super-imposed on the pictures. Kshitij Sharma at the CHILI lab of EPFL has processed the gaze data to augment the video with the teacher’s gaze and has documented the process in a short video (http://youtu.be/QV9aVWCP-NQ ).
