Absence and Presence of Faces in Videos during the COVID19 Lockdown

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak forced the educators to deploy digital online learning giving rise to a range of new situations. The phenomenon of undergraduate students not activating their cameras during video lectures has been widely reported. Also, the philosophies regarding the goals of pre-recorded online video vary. To get more insight into the role and importance of students’ and teacher's faces in video communication a video watching experiment and a questionnaire was designed and deployed in a class of 180 computer science students. The results indicate that students do to see the benefits of activating their own cameras. The results also show that there was a small benefit of including the lecturer's face in lecture videos.