Emotion Recognition in E-learning Systems

Technological advances in e-learning systems offer new opportunities for students to reinforce academic development and to improve accessibility to education. Facial expression recognition is an increasingly important area in intelligent e-learning systems. However, supporting the emotional side of students during learning tasks is challenging and demands an awareness of students' emotions. For this purpose, a brief review is presented in order to underlie the importance role of facial expression recognition in e-learning systems. Its role in special education is investigated too. This paper centers on facial expression recognition using convolutional neural networks and its application in e-learning systems, by introducing a new system composed of three main steps: preprocessing, features extraction and classification. We tested the proposed system with students aged between 8 and 12 years old, in an educational game. The results showed that the proposed system reached state of the art results.