Face Monitor: An Arbitrary Approach for Facial Engagement Monitoring in Virtual Classrooms

Following the spread of COVID-19, a sharp rise was found in virtual classrooms worldwide, where ensuring the continuous engagement of participants is a big challenge. Continuous engagement relies on continuous authentication, where technologies like biometrics are helpful to determine the engagement level of the participants. In our work, we developed an application called Face Monitor, which uses facial soft bio-metrics to authenticate the participants arbitrarily, and later to determine the engagement level using this arbitrary authentication information. Our developed application Face Monitor is a critical component of our proposed multi-faceted engagement monitoring platform known as ENGAGE. In our work, several existing online teaching and learning platforms are also compared for existing engagement monitoring support and we defined our own criterion for relative engagement. This paper presents a complete architecture of our developed application called Face Monitor, its functioning, and an output demo. In our opinion, Face Monitor is a genuinely useful application for the higher education sector throughout the world. Face Monitor can be useful to determine the relative level of engagement for different participants during a series of teaching sessions and to calculate overall grades for a module or training session.