Abstract
This paper proposes a novel, efficient and affordable approach to detect the students' engagement levels in an e-learning environment by using webcams. Our method analyzes spatiotemporal features of e-learners' micro body gestures, which will be mapped to emotions and appropriate engagement states. The proposed engagement detection model uses a three-dimensional convolutional neural network to analyze both temporal and spatial information across video frames. We follow a transfer learning approach by using the C3D model that was trained on the Sports-1M dataset. The adopted C3D model was used based on two different approaches; as a feature extractor with linear classifiers and a classifier after applying fine-tuning to the pretrained model. Our model was tested and its performance was evaluated and compared to the existing models. It proved its effectiveness and superiority over the other existing methods with an accuracy of 94%. The results of this work will contribute to the development of smart and interactive e-learning systems with adaptive responses based on users' engagement levels.