Teaching HCI Design in a Flipped Learning M.Sc. Course Using Eye-Tracking Peer Evaluation Data

This paper presents experiences from a flipped classroom M.Sc. course on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The students that finished successfully this course participated in twelve short workshops, based on a flipped classroom model. Each workshop focused on a specific HCI activity, while before the workshops, a two-hour lecture was used to introduce the students in the flipped learning concept. All the rest of the educational material was offered to the students online before each workshop. Such material was mainly short lectures from the professor, in the form of videos uploaded in the course's YouTube channel and documents delivered using the university learning management system (LMS). For each workshop the students had to be prepared to participate, which was tested using brief quizzes before the start of specific workshops. The activity presented in this paper was the design and evaluation of an interactive system. The students were asked to form six groups comprising of three to four students each. Then a system's description, vague enough to stimulate creativity, was randomly assigned to each group. This activity presented in this paper was the longest activity of the entire course and it was conducted in four consequent workshops. The paper presents the setting of this experiment, the peer assessment method and the use of eye-tracking data collected and analysed to aid the students towards improving their design. The students created a working model of the system with limited functionality and improved this model using eye-tracking data from the peer evaluation of this model. The use of these data offered them the insight to improve their models and to undergo design changes. The paper presents samples of the progress made between various versions of the models and concludes presenting the preliminary positive results of the students qualitative evaluation of this experiment.