T-EDUCO: A T-LEARNING TUTORING TOOL THAT CARES

Abstract

Interactive Digital Television is emerging as a potential medium to create opportunities for learning at home. In most existing t-learning (TV-based interactive learning) applications, the interaction with the user is limited to a simple sequential navigation within the application. And, since the educational contents are broadcast, there is no feedback from the student's progress. More engaged and intelligent t-learning interactive applications are needed to achieve more efficient forms of learning. This paper presents T-EDUCO, the first t-learning affective aware tutoring tool. T-EDUCO goes further than simply broadcasting an interactive educational application by allowing the figure of a tutor to be present and to govern the students' learning process. The tutor can access academic and emotional information about the students through a continuous "emotional path" that includes timestamps and information about the progress made in each exercise. In this way, personal messages or extra educational contents for improving learning can be sent to the students. The emotional information is extracted by a novel Artificial Intelligence method that evaluates with a 2-dimensional affective approach the students' facial expressions captured through a camera while performing the t-learning application tests. All this is made possible by a combination of broadcast and broadband technologies.