Online Learning With Brain Waves
One of the biggest advantages mankind has is our ability to pass on the knowledge we obtain through various forms of records. Let it be the olden ages when cave paintings and scripts were used to pass on the knowledge from their lifetime. Later on in time, storytellers who praised the lives of the kings (even though unreliable) spread the knowledge of their life through fables and art that are portrayed through monuments. In the current era, there are numerous ways to pass on our knowledge which are less likely to be manipulated, let it be in spreading pop culture through movies, songs, and memes or in showcasing our technical innovations through research papers and patents, which helps us stand on the shoulders of giants who have already made the mistakes we were probably bound to make.
Each generation gains a plethora of new information and passes most of this gained knowledge down to their descendants. The knowledge thus obtained helps us greatly to improve our quality of life. Children gain this knowledge through education, whether it be by attending classes in school or learning through the internet from various experts all around the globe. Currently, online learning has improved the methods of learning and teaching by making the information easily accessible to everyone.
Online Learning:
Online learning methods are the need of the hour as we all adapt to social distancing due to the spread of the coronavirus. We need alternative teaching methods for the curious minds of the current generation especially during difficult times such as the COVID-19 pandemic. I have personally skipped online lectures or logged in to an online lecture and have worked on other projects, and I have never failed to horribly regret doing this. Though we could attend classes through Zoom calls or watch recorded videos, it doesn’t have the same impact as a confined and engaging classroom session. During in-person classes, it is much easier to interact with the professor, ask questions, and make sure that we’re learning clearly and correctly. Validation greatly improves confidence towards a topic.
There exist Computer Aided-Instruction (CAI) systems that provide students with hints for their answers, and Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) which better interacts with the user by providing hints and unwinding the problem into sub-steps. Flipped learning is another emerging model that allows students to watch lectures at home and do hands-on work in the classrooms. The success of these methods depends heavily on how the user reacts to the content, whereas these methods miss the feedback link. They usually measure this through review questions at the end of each lecture but there is research going on which tries to augment the feedback by measuring student’s eye movements, posture, heart rate, skin conductance, and electroencephalography brain signals.
Brain-Computer Interface:
Technology has evolved from interacting with computers using a keyboard and a mouse to talking to “Alexa” or “Siri” to manage our schedules. There is a constant need to improve the efficiency with which this technology understands us, in order for it to assist us better. We use different coding platforms to understand their language, whereas computers use AI to understand our language. Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) research is an emerging field that uses brain signals to communicate with the computer. This is also used as a helpful avenue to unravel the mysteries of the human brain.
The electric signals from our brain are called electroencephalography signals. There are many ways to measure these and other brain signals using methods such as fMRI, fNIRs, EEG (which involves applying a gel on your scalp), dry electrode EEG, etc. Most of these methods are expensive and hence they are mostly used only for laboratory purposes and have a lot of electrodes. For commercial purposes, there are low-cost EEG headsets that use a single electrode, such as the “Neurosky Mindwave headset”.
The paper “ARTFuL: Adaptive Review Technology for Flipped Learning” proposes a method that could be used both in classroom environments and for online learning that evaluates the attentiveness of the student through a Neurosky headset, and uses this information to improve content delivery. They use the brain waves to find the topics to which the student paid the least attention and provide a review focused on these topics. For example, from the above image, we could say that the student was the least attentive during the Impressionism module, and so the reviews were focused on this particular module. The authors of this paper proved through experimentation that this method performs better than a focused review on topics the users paid more attention to, and sometimes even better than a full review of all the topics. They accomplished this by breaking down the signal to alpha, beta, and theta waves using Fast Fourier Transforms and then finding an attention index from these waves.
BCI is a good way to complete the feedback loop to provide information to the computer about the state of the student. Though this technology is not fool-proof or commercialized yet, research in this direction is showing promising results in many applications. With more innovation, cost-efficient ways to attain brain signals with better accuracy, this field will certainly produce improved results. Online learning could deeply benefit from this technology.
Reference: “Szafir, D. and Mutlu, B., 2013, April. ARTFul: adaptive review technology for flipped learning. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1001–1010).”
