How Students Learn using MOOCs: An Eye-tracking Insight

We present the results of an eye-tracking study on a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) lecture showing the relation between gaze variables and students’ performance and learning strategy. 40 students watched a MOOC lecture while their eye-movements were being recorded. We present a method to define stimuli-based gaze variables that can be defined for any kind of stimulus. The advantage of using stimuli-based gaze variables is that the relation of the gaze indicators with performance measures and behavioral measures can be interpreted differently for different kinds of stimulus. MOOCs are very diverse in nature; having such a variable description enables the researchers to have a common measure for the different kind of stimulus present in different MOOCs. The long-term goal is to create student profiles based on their performance and learning strategy using stimuli-based gaze variables and to provide the students with gaze-aware feedback to improve the overall learning process.