We are delighted to share that our collaborative research paper, "Behind the Screens: Exploring Eye Movement Visualization to Optimize Online Teaching and Learning," has been honored with the Best Paper Award at the Mensch und Computer ’23 conference. The paper was presented by Tobias Wagner and is a joint effort between our General Psychology group and the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) group, led by Enrico Rukzio. Furthermore, the paper is now available for public access as an open-access full text.

This research was notably contributed to by Bao Xin Lin, a former psychology master's student who has sadly passed away. Her invaluable contributions to the project have left a lasting impact, and we dedicate this work to her memory.
The study addresses a critical challenge in e-learning: the monitoring and management of student attention. Unlike traditional classrooms where instructors can gauge crowd attention through gaze cues, online environments lack such immediate feedback. To tackle this issue, we collected eye movement data from students and developed four types of eye-movement visualizations: a heat map, an ellipse map, two moving bars, and a vertical bar. These visualizations were then overlaid on several instructional videos.
Our findings revealed unexpected preferences among instructors. While the heat map and vertical bar are commonly used, instructors favored the less intrusive ellipse visualization for live online instruction. However, the heat map remained the preferred choice for retrospective analysis due to its detailed information. Importantly, all visualizations were found to enhance emotional connectedness in online learning.
The study opens up new avenues for improving both the effectiveness and emotional engagement in e-learning and has broader applications for all types of online presentations. While the results are preliminary, they offer valuable insights for future research and practical applications in both HCI and cognitive psychology.
The full paper is open access and can be read here: ACM Paper