Abstract:

What might attract the students’ attention during video lecture? What could allow teaching staff to keep learners’ interest throughout the online lecture? What ought to be done by the teacher and instructional designer to take care not only of the online learning course effectiveness, but also of the learners’ ability to follow the activities during the video session, being aware and trying to reduce possible signs of boredom or fatigue? Eye-tracking studies, recently fulfilled by Distance Education Study Centre, Riga Technical University, underline lecturer’s role while video-content streaming, as well as give some contributions to instructional design.
E-learning provides an invaluable knowledge delivery and acquisition experience. Moreover, such opportunity for the distance learning becomes especially crucial in pandemic times when the face-to-face communication and attending lectures in-person is limited and sometimes even impossible.
However, teachers and instructors are trying to develop well-considered user-centric instructional design, more and more attractive online learning content, efficient delivery forms, new tools and methods. No less issue also concerns the peculiarities of student involvement in online learning process. Many learning analytics instruments might provide appropriate data related to students’ activities in digital learning environments. And the eye-tracking could be considered as the one of technologies that are aimed to track, discover and interpret learners’ interests in particular learning objects, as well as students’ engagement into knowledge acquisition process, finding their areas of interests within online learning dashboards.
This study will open the differences in eye movements and their strategies while information processing, caused by culture and gender aspects, as well as cognitive styles which show how an individual perceives and processes the data. The author pays attention both to e-learners’ foveal and para-foveal vision, and argues how hidden objects on the screen during video-lectures can influence learners’ attention by various stimuli. Finally, the learners’ engagement and retention model is proposed, based on considerations noted before, and author’s eye-tracking experiments during video content streaming.

Keywords:

e-learning, vision, eye-tracking, instructional design, video-lectures