Understanding Emotional Analytics for Student Engagement: An Instructional Design Perspective

Main Focus Of The Chapter

The goal of this chapter is to place in perspective the status of research relative to understanding the influence of emotional analytics on student engagement in online learning involving visual displays, and its importance for effective instructional design. Central to this goal is a focus on techniques for measuring students’ emotional analytics in digital instructional design. A more interdisciplinary line of research on the engagement of students resulted in the creation and validation of Universal Designs for Learning (UDL) (Strangman, Hall, & Meyer, 2003), one principle of which is to provide multiple means of engagement (Rose & Meyer, 2000, 2002). More recent studies have found that student emotion influences cognitive activities. The Cognitive-Affective Theory of Learning with Media (CATLM) and the extension of Mayer’s Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (CTML) also indicate that affective learning features in a multimedia lesson can increase student engagement. Additionally, these theories can be operationalized to help students acquire deeper understanding (Moreno, 2006; Tian, Gao, Li, Zhang, Liang, Qian, & Zha, 2014). Leutner (2014) also states that emotion can become a mediator in multimedia learning. Mayer and Estrella (2014) found that emotional design in multimedia learning has an important influence on learning engagement and achievement. Positive emotional feelings play an important role in multimedia learning and should be taken into account when designing multimedia learning materials (Plass, Heidig, Hayward, Homer, & Um, 2014; Wu, Huang, & Hwang, 2016; Hsu, 2016).