An Online Education Effect Assessing Method Based on YOLOv8 and Vision Transformer

Due to the rapid growth of online education worldwide, assessing the learning effectiveness of students during online classes has become increasingly challenging for teachers. In this paper, a method of assessing online education effect based on YOLOv8 and Vision Transformer is proposed. Firstly, the drowsiness state of students in an online teaching unconstraint environment is estimated by using YOLOv8, and then the gaze direction of awake students is estimated by using Vision Transformer to assess the students' attention levels during online education. The results from YOLOv8 are determined based on the calculated probabilities of drowsiness or wakefulness. And then gaze estimation method proposed in this paper was compared with state-of-the-art methods on the MPIIFaceGaze and Gaze360 datasets in which the angular errors of gaze estimation are 4.58° and 12.27°, respectively. We conducted experiments and analysis on a self-made dataset, from which the results demonstrate the feasibility of our method in an unconstrained environment.