Mental workload management as a tool in e-learning scenarios

Abstract

In our daily life, we often have a sense of being exhausted due to mental or physical work, together with a feeling of performance degradation in the accomplishment of simple tasks. This is in part due to the fact that the working capacity and the performance of an individual, either physical or mental, generally decrease as the day progresses, although factors like motivation also play a significant role. These negative effects are especially significant when carrying out long or demanding tasks, as often happens in an educational context. In order to avoid these effects, initiatives to promote a good management of the time and effort invested in each task are mandatory. Such initiatives, when effective, can have a wide range of positive effects, including on the performance, productivity, attention and even mental health. Seeking to find a viable and realistic approach to address this problem, this paper presents a non-invasive and non-intrusive way to measure mental workload, one of the aspects that affects mental fatigue the most. Specifically, we target scenarios of e-learning, in which the professor may not be present to assess the student's state. The aim is to create a tool that enables an actual management of fatigue in such environments and thus allows for the implementation of more efficient learning processes, adapted to the abilities and state of each student.