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Department of Computer Science & Engineering

RV College of Engineering, Bengaluru - 560059
2020 – 21
DESIGN THINKING LAB (18CS47)
PROBLEM IDENTIFIED

THEME: Simulated Intelligence (Online Education Platforms)

TITLE: Using Multimodal Affect Recognition to build a model to Assist Online Education

PROBLEM IDENTIFIED:

In the current situation, when the world has been faced with the deadly pandemic, Online Education has become a vital
medium for knowledge delivery. But we all know the challenges that come along with excessive utilization of
technology in these unforeseen circumstances. Therefore, it is important to find innovative ways, to better online
education. With the growing use of Video Conferencing and MOOCs Platforms to aid education, it has become the
need of the hour to bridge the gap between what the teacher is teaching and what the student is comprehending. In
addition, an interactive method must be employed to aid the teaching faculty in receiving feedback to strengthen the
relationship between the lecturer and the imbiber. Being a direct stakeholder in this situation, we understand the
difficulties faced by students and teachers.

As students, we all have multiple distractions at home in terms of TV, mobile, gaming consoles, family members, and
social media to name a few. To add to this, there is no system to monitor our actions and hence, self-discipline becomes
the only driving factor in keeping us focused. Moreover, very few students interact in class, while most of the others
are hesitant. This brings the general morale of the class down. We have also noticed it is far more difficult to have one-
on-one interactions with the teachers to clear our doubts. On the flip side, lecturers find it difficult talking in a non-
responsive environment. They are unable to assess the comprehension of subject material by students until the exam
season and this defeats the purpose of education. Hence this problem is of grave concern to us.

END USER/CUSTOMER OF YOUR SOLUTION:

The end users of this idea are people directly related to the educational field, that is students, professors, teachers,
MOOCs platforms, online platform educators, to name a few. With the help of our idea, we aim to eradicate the above-
mentioned problems of our stakeholders. From the student’s side, we aim to build a model that provides them an
external compulsion for them to pay attention in class. This will help them stay away from these distractions and
provide ultimate focus. In addition, if students appear confused, our model will send this feedback to the lecturers to
help them identify and aid the students who require more explanation. We also plan to help lecturers better understand
moments in class when a student was not able to comprehend the subject matter. With immediate and continuous
feedback, the teaching faculty will be able to curate classes that are tailored for their students. They will also be able to
assess the student’s comprehension at the same level as offline classes, if not more. MOOCs platforms will also be able
to receive feedback from all their course attendees, which was limited before as it is not compulsory to give feedback.
Our customer can also be expanded to accommodate company trainees and interns, thereby branching from the
educational sector.
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PROPOSED SOLUTION:

 Empathy: We understand the problems faced by all our stakeholders, but to get a better insight into the
problem we will conduct a series of interviews and send out survey forms to collect all their valuable inputs.
We intend to cover a wide array of people. A few people we have short-listed to get diverse opinions from are
undergraduate design, engineering, medical and commerce students from India and abroad, high school and
primary school students, primary school and high school from private and government institutions, engineering
professors, principal, at home extra-curricular teacher and MOOCs platform teacher.
 Define: As mentioned earlier in the problem statement, our idea is to find a solution to bridge the gap between
teacher’s expectation and student’s comprehension.
 Ideate: Based on the current data that we have procured, we believe the best solution to this problem will be to
build a model that uses data and machine learning for the detection of a student’s affective state, to move them
out of negative states that inhibit learning, into positive states such as engagement. With improving
technology, we believe that affect recognition has the potential to become a vital tool to enhance the standard
of online education. With the steady increase in research of advancements in this field, we can now use a
multi-modal approach to affect recognition.
 Prototype: We aim to build a prototype that takes in parameters such as audio and video recordings of students
from the online platforms and assesses student posture, gesture, speech, facial expression, and eye tracking to
characterize their emotions to various classifications and provide statistical analysis of this data to teachers as
feedback.
 Test: We hope to test this model in our college and understand the nitty-gritties of our model and improve it in
the near future.

TEAM DETAILS

1RV19CS013 Akshita Gupta A Sec

1RV19CS113 Pooja Rajesh B Sec
1RV19CS117 Praneeta Immadisetty B Sec

SIGNATURE OF FACULTY MENTOR SIGNATURE OF THE HOD

NAME: (DEPT. OF CSE)