Effect of Face Appearance of a Teacher Avatar on Active Participation During Online Live Class

The worldwide outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic led to many changes in the methods used to impart education, with nearly all university courses in Japan transitioning to an online format, particularly video conferencing of live lectures. Considering the difficulties students face in remaining engaged during online lectures, we propose methods to maximize student participation by displaying a real-time animated avatar of the teacher’s face over the lecture slides. Students were presented with photos of different teachers and asked to select whom they would prefer to take a class with, and whom they would not prefer. An open-source deep fake tool was then used to animate the selected photos by following the facial expressions of a teacher in real-time. These animations were superimposed over the lecture slides in an online class. Our experimental results show that students taught by their preferred teacher’s animated avatar posted more comments, which was the form of feedback used, compared to when they were taught by a less preferred teacher’s avatar on the slides. We speculate that a change in the teacher’s avatar influences active student participation in online learning.