Shaping learners' attention in massive open online courses

Abstract

We present an eye-tracking study in the context of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) videos. We propose to use a pre-test as a way of priming students about the video content before they watch the video. In this study, we used two versions of the same pre-test: textual and schema based. The results show that priming has an effect on the learning gain as well as the gaze patterns of students as they watch the videos; the type of priming has an effect on whether students spend more time looking at textual or schema video elements.