Looking AT versus Looking THROUGH: A Dual Eye-tracking study in MOOC Context

Abstract

We report the results from an eye-tracking study to show the differences in gaze patterns across the MOOC learners, while they watch a lecture individually as well as when they collaborate on an add-on activity. 98 university students took part in a study where they watched the MOOC video individually and later they collaboratively constructed a concept map. In both phases the gaze data was recorded. We compute two gaze measures: (1) with-me-ness, to quantify how much students follow the teacher during the video lecture, (2) gaze similarity, to quantify how much the pair looks at the same set of objects while collaborating. The analysis shows that both of the measures correlate significantly with the learning outcome. We argue that these results, conforming to our previous findings, indicate that the proposed gaze measures give a fairly accurate proxy to learners’ engagement and performance.