Menekse Adar (left) and Dr. Serkan Varol demonstrate the EEG and eye tracking devices. Photo by Angela Foster.
If you’re a student or faculty member at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, you have most likely used Canvas.
The digital learning space is a platform where assignments, lectures, quizzes, grades and feedback live, and the way it is designed may matter more than students realize.
Menekse Adar, a graduate student in engineering management at UTC’s College of Engineering and Computer Science, is working to understand how different Canvas course layouts shape students’ engagement in their classes.
Adar completed her undergraduate degree in Turkey before coming to UTC, where she began working with Dr. Serkan Varol, an assistant professor of engineering management and the project’s faculty lead.
“The main goal of my study is to understand how students’ emotions change while they are looking at a course template,” Adar said. “By using EEG (electroencephalogram) and eye tracking, we aim to detect moments of engagement, attention or emotional shifts without asking students to report their feelings. This helps us observe their learning experience in a more objective and natural way.”
To do that, Adar collects two streams of data at once. The EEG headset records brain activity from 14 channels, including the frontal left and right regions—both linked to attention and emotional valence. She then extracts two measurements from the signals: frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) and the beta/alpha ratio.
“The valence is the positive or negative feelings,” she explained. “If the valence value is high, that means it’s positive. We applied FAA, which is how alert or activated the person is.
“When beta waves are higher than alpha waves, it means arousal is higher and the person is more awake, focused or emotionally active.”
At the same time, an eye-tracking device records where students look, how long they fixate on different parts of the page and the order in which their eyes move across the screen.
After collecting both signals, Adar synchronized them by time and analyzed them in short windows to see exactly when attention increases, drops or shifts.
She examined four different Canvas course structures. Some were content-heavy; others were more organized around weekly modules.
In her analysis, the structured layout produced the strongest and most consistent signals of student focus.
Menekse Adar
Other patterns appeared across all four courses. Regardless of layout, students tended to concentrate on the same core areas.
“Students spend most of their time on the home, syllabus and modules,” Adar said. “Discussions were almost never used, actually. Students mainly interacted with the course content and spent less time on the other sections.”
With the Canvas project wrapping up, Varol is preparing to shift toward new studies that use the same tools to examine consumer decision-making.
“We’re trying to investigate how people make purchasing decisions by combining eye trackers, EEG devices,” Varol said. “At the end of the day, they’re going to either say yes or no—‘Do I want to purchase this?’ If yes, we get all this information and we build a predictive model.”
The work also points to how research in the College of Engineering and Computer Science is expanding beyond traditional technical boundaries, particularly when it comes to understanding how students learn and engage with technology.
“I truly admire Dr. Varol’s innovative approach to understanding student engagement through neurotechnology,” Dean Kumar Yelamarthi said. “This work not only reflects our ‘Six Cs’—curiosity to explore new possibilities; connection between technology and learning; and creating value for students—but also advances research by integrating cutting-edge methods such as EEG and eye tracking. These efforts position UTC at the forefront of educational innovation, opening new pathways for impactful scholarship.”
Moving forward, Varol plans to develop a neurotechnology lab on campus to incorporate the research into an elective course for students.
“Students will be able to get hands-on experience while learning about the data,” he explained.
For Adar, the research has become an important part of her academic path.
“It was a great opportunity for me to use these methods and apply them into my research or my thesis,” she said. “This turned into a passion for me.”
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