Virtual classroom system with improved student feedback

Student feedback in traditional virtual classrooms is usually limited to intentional feedback. Information pertaining to the actual mental state (bored, interested, content, confused), gathered from facial expressions and gestures is lost. The paper focuses on methods to increase student feedback without placing unnecessary or excessive strain on available resources such as bandwidth, memory and processing power. The method uses indirect (facial actions from student video) and direct (answers to questions and opinions) feedback to estimate the student´s state. These estimates are then used to prioritise video transmission/updating from student to teacher. An experimental system is currently being developed and implemented using the Java Multimedia Framework (JMF)