Eye Tracking and the Future of the Classroom

Education through the mode of the classroom where there is one teacher for every 10-15 students is slowly dying. Overcrowding in the schools and budget-cuts coupled with the inability of many teachers to engage the students really leaves the door open for the future of education to evolve. into learning through interaction with other students, teachers, experts & native speakers in both the real and virtual worlds.

Learning a language as an adult should be the same as it is as a child, through active immersion. Rosetta Stone has hit the nail on the head for language education. Their dynamic immersion method really does the next best thing to living in another country, it forces you to learn without translation or grammar explanation but rather through example and inference based on a common reference — the visual process. Images of people, objects, actions and interactions all have a common reference within all languages and nationalities, just different modes of verbal distinction. Rosetta Stone provides that distinction without returning the student to their point of reference or by translating to their native language. Thus it creates new patterns of reference and programs new neural pathways for understanding. Computer aided instruction that provides this sense of immersion without translation or explanation really does do the best job of locking in the knowledge in much the same way that we learned concepts, comprehension, and speaking when we were little.

But the problem with programs like Rosetta Stone is that many students may understand a concept but might make errors of commission and the program has no way of distinguishing omission from commission. This could be solved through a video eye tracker or other eye tracking technology that would record point of gaze, gaze movement patterns, emotional states and concept recognition by dynamically recording and processing both the eye movement and pupil dilation patterns. This information would allow instruction to become much more adaptive to the student’s learning methods, pace and capacity much in the same way a good tutor or teacher intuitively reacts to changes in their students’ attitudes, output and body language in the classroom. Thus, a program could shift and rearrange instruction based on how the person reacts to a core stimulus and even return to those concepts that were particularly hard for a student to comprehend.

This type of system would not only be good for artificial algorithmic software instruction but also for the online coaching and games in the manners provided through Rosetta Studio and Rosetta World in version 4 of the newly branded Rosetta Stone TOTALe v4 software package. Other students and the online coach cannot respond to the visual cues inherent in all humans and our body language when there is no webcam to share that visual information from the students’ faces. Through eye tracking or other biometric processing, an alert could be generated where the person’s voice icon would flash red when angry or orange for frustration and even blue or green for happiness or real comprehension allowing the coach or other students to react appropriately.

There are many other ways that the new world of software aided and virtual instruction could benefit from eye tracking and biometrics and we will be revisiting this topic again over the course of its evolution.