Introducing a Multiple Model for Evaluating User Engagement in Educational Virtual Worlds
Omid Mohamad Nezami, Deborah Richards · 2017
User engagement (UE) is closely correlated to the performance of educational environments including educational virtual worlds (EVWs). In this paper, we aim at introducing a model to assess UE to evaluate the performance of our EVW called Omosa. In fact, applying this model, we can achieve an accurate and comprehensive assessment for UE. This model is a combination of several methods to evaluate diverse UE dimensions including academic, emotional, cognitive and behavioural. Since each dimension has its own characteristics, specific methods should be applied to measure it. Each method, however, suffers from some limitations and gives an incomplete assessment. We intend to incorporate several methods to compensate the limitations of each method and obtain a comprehensive and precise UE assessment model. This work consists of three main sections. For the first section, we use a method called academic record to understand the academic dimension of UE. This method includes some predefined questions which are asked from teachers. In the second section, we use a self-report method called Student Engagement Instrument to evaluate the emotional and cognitive dimensions of UE. For the last section, we use machine vision based approaches to evaluate the behavioural dimension of UE. Combining the results from in each section, we could accurately calculate the performance of our EVW.