Determining the Optimal Duration of a Single Lecture in Distance Education Using Facial Analysis of Instructors

The COVID-19 Pandemic, which has affected the entire world profoundly, has given rise to changes in many areas. The change in the education system appears as a compulsory transition to distance education, which raises the question as to how long the lectures in distance education should last. This study examined the emotional changes of the instructors who teach in the distance education environment by analyzing their faces with the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Through the software developed by the researchers, the emotions of the instructors were evaluated in terms of feelings of disgust, sadness, happiness, fear, contempt, anger, and surprise. For evaluation, 53,923 photographs were obtained from 149.8 hours of videos recorded in 288 sessions of 29 different courses provided by 9 instructors and 47,883 of them were analyzed. Based on the changes in emotions, the optimum lecture time in the distance education environment was examined. In addition, the study determined the effects of instructors, courses, programs, weeks of the course, students' attendance, lecture type, session information on emotional changes. The study revealed that instructors' negative emotions generally increased between the 11th and 20th minutes, whereas the negative emotions of the instructors who preferred to have a longer session decreased after the 25th and 35th minutes. The study revealed that all of the emotions mentioned varied according to instructors, courses and programs that some emotions differed significantly according to students' attendance and lecture type, and that week of the course and session information did not cause any emotional changes.