Implementation of real-time online mouse tracking on overseas quiz session

Abstract

Mouse tracking serves as an alternative to eye tracking in measuring the learning process in education because of its affordability. Moreover, mouse tracking does not require extra hardware, as in the case of eye tracking, because it is a feature in personal computers by default. Therefore, it is possible to implement mouse tracking in a massive open scale. However, mouse tracking has only been implemented in a laboratory setting to date, ostensibly because of the associated extremely high running costs. Nonetheless, there is no available data to support the claim of high resource costs, which has resulted in much speculation among implementers. In general, the implementation of mouse tracking in a non-laboratory environment is still rare. Therefore, the authors developed an application to investigate real-time mouse tracking online. It was implemented on the Moodle learning management system and tested on an online quiz session accessed abroad. Additionally, the application can handle tracking on mobile devices. In this work, the main resources that include CPU, network, RAM, and storage costs were measured when mouse tracking was used. These results can serve as a reference for network and server administrators during future implementation of this technique. It was determined that the characteristics of mouse activities were dynamic in that occasional surges and lulls were observed. Additionally, this article also discussed the advantage of real-time and online implementation to regular online implementation and showed that there is a possibility of implementing mouse tracking on a large scale if mouse tracking data are not aggregated and transmitted as a single data package.