Two-Way Gaze Sharing in Remote Teaching

On-line teaching situations where a tutor and their students are remote from each other mean that contact between them is reduced compared with teaching in a classroom. We report an initial study of two-way gaze sharing between a tutor and a group of students, who were in different locations. A 45-min class consisted of an introductory lecture followed by an exercise in using two software tools, one for building an experiment and the other for analysis of the data collected. The tutor went through an exercise step by step and the students followed. This was run twice with four students on each run. The tutor had a view of the students' desktops with their gaze markers overlaid and each student had a view of the tutor's desktop and gaze marker. Students found seeing the tutor's gaze marker helpful during the exercise but distracting when reading the text on the lecture slides. The tutor found the view of the students' gaze point helpful as an indicator of their current object of attention when giving assistance to individuals.