Impact of Online Courses on University Student Visual Attention During the COVID-19 Pandemic

BACKGROUND: Under the threat of COVID-19, many universities offer online courses to avoid student gatherings, which prevent teachers from collecting responses and optimizing courses. This work collected eye movement data to analyze attention allocation and proposed instruction for improving the courses. METHODS: Subjects were recruited to watch three online courses. Meanwhile, their eye movement data were collected through Dikablis Glasses. Mayer’s multimedia cognitive theory was adopted to discriminate the pivotal components of online course, and the Mann–Whitney relevance analysis demonstrated that different representations of courses affected the viewers’ attention differently. RESULTS: Three subjects watched three different types of political courses. Course 1, which combined text and explanation, attracted the most attention. Course 2 was shown to be less attractive than course 1 and better than course 3, but the subjects were distracted by the animations in course 2. Course 3, which did not use any technique to present learning content, attracts the least attention from the subjects. A correlation analysis shows that course 1 and course 3 have similar results compared with course 2. CONCLUSION: Online courses have become a norm during the COVID-19 pandemic. Improving the quality of online courses can effectively reduce the impact of the epidemic on teaching. These experiment results suggest that text + commentary in the design of online courses can effectively attract the attention of the listeners and achieve better learning results. Attention gradually rises in the early stage and then falls after reaching a peak. At this time, the proper introduction of animation can effectively reverse the attention curve, while individual text or commentary results in quickly losing the listener’s attention.