Background: Examining student attention in physical classrooms is crucial, but it faces challenges due to the lack of accurate monitoring. Constraints posed by device limitations and the design of educational materials impede the integration of eye-tracking technology in these settings. Objectives: This study aims to (1) develop a wearable…

Background: Instructors' facial expressions in instructional videos can greatly influence how learners perceive their emotions, thereby affecting students' attention to the learning content and their overall performance. While the short-term effects of instructors' specific facial expressions in instructional videos have been well documented, less…

Background: Online video-based learning often leads to fatigue, which detracts from engagement and learning outcomes. Previous studies have examined monitoring mental states like attention through electroencephalography (EEG) headsets, but limitations such as high costs, discomfort, and limited scalability persist. Objectives: This study evaluates…

Background: Over recent years, interest towards the use of immersive technologies has grown in parallel with the lowering of equipment costs: educators have started embedding them into their teaching practices at different levels of the educational system, from primary school to higher education. In general, immersive technologies are seen as…

Background: There are only few guidelines on how instructional videos should be designed to optimize learning. Recently, the effects of social cues on attention allocation and learning in instructional videos have been investigated. Due to inconsistent results, it has been suggested that the visual complexity of a video influences the effect of…

Background: Video lectures which include the instructor's presence are becoming increasingly popular. Presenting a real human does, however, entail higher financial and time costs in making videos, and one innovative approach to reduce costs has been to generate a virtual speaking instructor. Objectives: The current study examined whether the use…

Eye movement modelling examples (EMME) are computer-based videos displaying the visualized eye gaze behaviour of a domain expert person (model) while carefully executing the learning or problem-solving task. The role of EMME in promoting cognitive performance (i.e., final scores of learning outcome or problem solving) has been questioned due to…

Background: Little is known about the effectiveness of instructors when presenting content in videos alone. In recent years, researchers have increasingly begun to explore the effects of instructors' social cues (e.g., eye gaze, body orientation, etc.) on learning. However, previous studies exploring the effects of eye gaze have confounded the…

Eye movement modelling examples (EMMEs) are instructional videos of a model's demonstration and explanation of a task that also show where the model is looking. EMMEs are expected to synchronize students' visual attention with the model's, leading to better learning than regular video modelling examples (MEs). However, synchronization is seldom…

Background: Guided gaze is the instructor's gaze towards teaching materials to guide students' attention, and it plays a vital role in enhancing video-based education. The duration of guided gaze, indicating how long instructors focus on teaching materials, varies based on the lecture design. Nevertheless, the impact of varying durations of guided…

Instructor behaviour is known to affect learning performance, but it is unclear which specific instructor behaviours can optimize learning. We used eye-tracking technology and questionnaires to test whether the instructor's gaze guidance affected learners' visual attention, social presence, and learning performance, using four video lectures:…

Recent studies exploring the effects of dynamic visualizations on learning compared with static visualizations have yielded mixed results. Procedural motor learning is one of the few fields in which dynamic representations have shown to be effective. Many of the studies have suggested that this advantage is mainly due to the activation of the…

We investigated the effects of seeing the instructor's (i.e., the model's) face in video modeling examples on students' attention and their learning outcomes. Research with university students suggested that the model's face attracts students' attention away from what the model is doing, but this did not hamper learning. We aimed to investigate…