Predicting Engagement Intensity in the Wild Using Temporal Convolutional Network

Engagement is the holy grail of learning whether it is in a classroom setting or an online learning platform. Studies have shown that engagement of the student while learning can benefit students as well as the teacher if the engagement level of the student is known. It is difficult to keep track of the engagement of each student in a face-to-face learning happening in a large classroom. It is even more difficult in an online learning platform where, the user is accessing the material at different instances. Automatic analysis of the engagement of students can help to better understand the state of the student in a classroom setting as well as online learning platforms and is more scalable. In this paper we propose a framework that uses Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) to understand the intensity of engagement of students attending video material from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The input to the TCN network is the statistical features computed on 10 second segments of the video from the gaze, head pose and action unit intensities available in OpenFace library. The ability of the TCN architecture to capture long term dependencies gives it the ability to outperform other sequential models like LSTMs. On the given test set in the EmotiW 2018 sub challenge-"Engagement in the Wild", the proposed approach with Dilated-TCN achieved an average mean square error of 0.079.