A Dashboard for Affective E-learning: Data Visualization for Monitoring Online Learner Emotions

In an ordinary classroom, teachers monitor their students’ emotional reactions while learning, even if only by glancing at their faces while they work. In this way, teachers can gauge the effectiveness of their teaching strategies, determining whether students are bored, frustrated, or anxious. Teachers can see how emotions change over time, perhaps from positive, to challenged, and later triumphant. All this is difficult with educational software used online. In this paper we present software to address this gap. Our MADE Teacher’s Dashboard is a web application that supports educators to inspect and reflect on the emotional states of students using web learning applications. We apply theories of emotion in learning, together with a software library to identify emotions using computer vision. The Dashboard features a novel visualization of the emotional state of learners through time over the process of a learning activity.