Keystrokes and Clicks: Measuring Stress on E-learning Students

Abstract

In traditional learning, teachers can easily get an insight into how their students work and learn and how they interact in the classroom. However, in online learning, it is more difficult for teachers to see how individual students behave. With the enormous growing of e-learning platforms, as complementary or even primary tool to support learning in organizations, monitoring students' success factors becomes a crucial issue. In this paper we focus on the importance of stress in the learning process. Stress detection in an E-learning environment is an important and crucial factor to success. Estimating, in a non-invasive way, the students' levels of stress, and taking measures to deal with it, is then the goal of this paper. Moodle, by being one of the most used e-learning platforms is used to test the log tool referred in this work.

Under pressure

“…The main finding of his work is that higher arousal levels, such as the ones observed during stress episodes, increased the mouse speed and acceleration, which translated into less precise movement. More recently, Rodrigues et al [26] explored the utility of using the mouse and the keyboard to sense the stress of 10 computer science students during programming assignments of varying difficulty. One of their main findings was that students answering the most challenging assignment (associated with more stress) showed considerably more mouse movement.…”

An Environment for Studying Visual Emotion Perception

“…Nonetheless, they can also be used to detect signicant changes in the user's behaviour, which may indicate a signicant change in the user's state. In previous work we have studied the eects of mental fatigue and stress on keystroke and mouse dynamics [5,6].…”

Monitoring Level Attention Approach in Learning Activities

“…[3]. Being a cognitive process, attention is strongly connected with learning [4]. When it comes to acquiring new knowledge, attention can be considered one the most important mechanisms [5].…”

“…When students are subjected to increasing periods of work with a progressive focus on autonomy and continuous assessment, the workload is perceived as stressful and usually leads to emotional disorders, which affects attention and concentration [6]. However, in small periods of time, stress tends to behave in a more efficient way, decreasing the number of unnecessary actions as students are more focused on their tasks [4].…”