Introducing eye blink of a student to the virtual world and evaluating the affection of the eye blinking during the e-Learning

Abstract

Problem Based Learning (PBL) is an educational process by which problem-solving activities and instructor's guidance facilitate learning. The PBL is suffered from the current issues in the traditional education system such as enhancing quality, reducing cost and increasing access. Virtual e-Learning (VeL) can be overcome those issues and become a major way of delivering the knowledge. The VeL is in early stage and there are many ways to enhance the effectiveness of the VeL. The establishment of the non-verbal features, which are essential elements in the education process, [1] is a one way of improving the quality of VeL. One of the non-verbal features (Eye blink) is visualized in the VeL and the affection of that non-verbal feature to the VeL is accessed in this research. The eye blink, which is an important non-verbal feature of the real student [2], is mirrored in the VeL environment. The affection of the eye blink was evaluated through an experiment with the responses of the e-Learning participants. The experiment consisted by PBL sessions with and without eye blinking. The evaluated factors of the questionnaire showed that a high rate of positive responses during the sessions with the eye blinks than the session without the eye blinks and also the difference of the mean ranks is 25%. Further, Mann-Whitney U test is utilized to analyze the responses of the students to determine whether there is a significant difference in the sessions with and without the eye blinking. It is identified that the eye blink helps to enhance the effectiveness of the group discussion significantly over the effect size value (r) of the selected factors have more than 0.62 suggested a moderate to high practical significance when they utilized the eye blinks in the VeL.