Using Electroencephalography to Determine Student Attention in the Classroom

The Higher Education landscape caters to the learning requirement for a large and diverse cohort of students. With diversity comes the additional challenge for educators to design engaging learning content and environment that holds the student's attention in the classroom. This paper presents the evolution of a PhD research topic that stemmed from the findings of a conference workshop titled “Enhancing the 21st century educational landscape with wearables”. This work examined the challenges faced by educators in the classroom and used that information to propose a technological solution for the most common challenge – student's attention in the classroom. After complementing the literature review, data was collected from educators in a face-to-face conference workshop. This paper reports on the initial findings from the workshop and the resulting research questions of the PhD titled “Using electroencephalography (EEG) data analytics to empower learners and teachers”.