Emoviz: Supporting Learners’ Regulation based on Visualization of Emotional Information

Summary

A first study, conducted in collaboration with McGill University and University of Geneva focused on learners' awareness of their emotions in university level academic contexts as a first step to help learners regulate their emotions. Existing emotion awareness tools offer little information on learners’ emotions and their antecedents. This study resulted in the design of an emotion-reporting grid for assessing the emotions that students experienced on a daily basis. Another study was conducted with the SpeakPlus company as part of the PhD thesis of Mohamed Ez-Zaouia. Socio-affective relationships play an important role in learning processes and learning outcomes, but they are harder to develop in online-learning. We developed Emodash, an interactive dashboard supporting tutors’ retrospective awareness of learners’ emotions in a video-conferencing learning environment. We conducted an eight-week long field study with five professional tutors on how they used Emodash while writing feedback to learners after language learning sessions. We found that 1) this dashboard led tutors who were already sensitive to learners’ emotions to a stronger awareness of these emotions, 2) glanceable visualizations of learners’ emotions may be preferred and sufficient to foster tutors’ awareness of learners’ emotions, and finally 3) the dashboard induced new pedagogical practices, with tutors using learners’ emotions as a proxy evaluation of their teaching.

Collaborators

Aurélien Tabard (University Lyon 1, LIRIS), Gaëlle Molinari (University of Geneva), Susanne Lajoie (University McGill, ATLAS lab)

PhD student

Mohamed Ez-Zaouia (2017-2020) - Factors for dashboards design and use to inform teachers’ practices in situ-