Glancee: An Adaptable System for Instructors to Grasp Student Learning Status in Synchronous Online Classes

Synchronous online learning has become a trend in recent years. However, instructors often face the challenge of inferring audiences’ reactions and learning status without seeing their faces in video feeds, which prevents instructors from establishing connections with students. To solve this problem, based on a need-finding survey with 67 college instructors, we propose Glancee, a real-time interactive system with adaptable configurations, sidebar-based visual displays, and comprehensive learning status detection algorithms. Then, we conduct a within-subject user study in which 18 college instructors deliver lectures online with Glancee and two baselines, EngageClass and ZoomOnly. Results show that Glancee can effectively support online teaching and is perceived to be significantly more helpful than the baselines. We further investigate how instructors’ emotions, behaviors, attention, cognitive load, and trust are affected during the class. Finally, we offer design recommendations for future online teaching assistant systems.