A Novel Deep Learning Technique for Detecting Emotional Impact in Online Education

Emotional intelligence is the automatic detection of human emotions using various intelligent methods. Several studies have been conducted on emotional intelligence, and only a few have been adopted in education. Detecting student emotions can significantly increase productivity and improve the education process. This paper proposes a new deep learning method to detect student emotions. The main aim of this paper is to map the relationship between teaching practices and student learning based on emotional impact. Facial recognition algorithms extract helpful information from online platforms as image classification techniques are applied to detect the emotions of student and/or teacher faces. As part of this work, two deep learning models are compared according to their performance. Promising results are achieved using both techniques, as presented in the Experimental Results Section. For validation of the proposed system, an online course with students is used; the findings suggest that this technique operates well. Based on emotional analysis, several deep learning techniques are applied to train and test the emotion classification process. Transfer learning for a pre-trained deep neural network is used as well to increase the accuracy of the emotion classification stage. The obtained results show that the performance of the proposed method is promising using both techniques, as presented in the Experimental Results Section.