1D Multi-Point Local Ternary Pattern: A Novel Feature Extraction Method for Analyzing Cognitive Engagement of students in Flipped Learning Pedagogy

Flipped learning is a blended learning method based on academic engagement of students online (outside class) and offline (inside class). In this learning pedagogy, students receive lesson any time from lecture videos pre-loaded on digital platform at their convenience places and it is followed by in-classroom activities such as doubt clearing, problem solving, etc. However, students are constantly exposed to high levels of distraction in this age of the Internet. Therefore, it is hard for an instructor to know whether a student has paid attention while watching pre-loaded lecture video. In order to analyze attention level of individual students, captured brain signal or electroencephalogram (EEG) of students can be utilized. In this study, we utilize a popular feature extraction technique called Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and improvise it to develop an enhanced feature selection method. The adapted feature selection method termed as 1D Multi-Point Local Ternary Pattern (1D MP-LTP) is used to extract unique features from collected electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Standard classification techniques are exploited to classify the attention level of students. Experiments are conducted with the data captured at Intelligent Data Analysis Lab, NIT Rourkela, to show effectiveness of the proposed feature extraction technique. The proposed 1D Multi-Point Local Ternary Pattern (1D MP-LTP)-based classification techniques outperform traditional and state-of-the-art classification techniques using LBP. This research can be helpful for instructors to identify students who need special care for improving their learning ability. Researchers in educational technology can extend this work by adopting this methodology in other online teaching pedagogy such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC).