This paper proposes a novel, efficient and affordable approach to detect the students’ engagement levels in an e-learning environment by using webcams. Our method analyzes spatiotemporal features of e-learners’ micro body gestures, which will be mapped to emotions and appropriate engagement states. The proposed engagement detection model uses a three-dimensional convolutional neural network to analyze both temporal and spatial information across video frames. We follow a transfer learning approach by using the C3D model that was trained on the Sports-1M dataset. The adopted C3D model was used based on two different approaches; as a feature extractor with linear classifiers and a classifier after applying fine-tuning to the pre-trained model. Our model was tested and its performance was evaluated and compared to the existing models. It proved its effectiveness and superiority over the other existing methods with an accuracy of 94%. The results of this work will contribute to the development of smart and interactive e-learning systems with adaptive responses based on users’ engagement levels.

In this paper, we propose new 3D CNN prediction models for detecting student engagement levels in an e-learning environment. The first generated model classifies students’ engagement to high positive engagement or low positive engagement. The second generated model classifies engagement to low negative engagement or disengagement. To predict the engagement level, the proposed prediction models learn the deep spatiotemporal features of the body activities of the students. In addition, we collected a new video dataset for this study. The new dataset was collected in realistic, uncontrolled settings from real students attending real online classes. Our findings are threefold: (1) Spatiotemporal features are more suitable for analyzing body activities from video data; (2) our proposed prediction models outperform state-of-the-art methods and have proven their effectiveness; and (3) our newly collected video dataset, which reflects realistic scenarios, contributed to delivering comparable results to current methods. The findings of this work will strengthen the knowledge base for the development of intelligent and interactive e-learning systems that can give feedback based on user engagement.