Abstract

Acoustic features and machine learning models have been recently proposed as promising tools to analyze lessons. Furthermore, acoustic patterns, both in the time and spectral domain, have been found to be related to teacher pedagogical practices. Nonetheless, most of previous work relies on expensive or third party equipment, limiting its scalability, and additionally, it is mainly used for diarization. Instead, in this work we present a cost-effective approach to identify teachers' practices according to three categories (Presenting, Administration, and Guiding) which are compiled from the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM. Particularly, we record teachers' lessons using low-cost microphones connected to their smartphones. We then compute the mean and standard deviation of the amplitude, Mel spectrogram, and Mel Frequency Cepstral coefficients of the recordings to train supervised models for the task of predicting three categories compiled from the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM. We found that spectral features perform better at the task of predicting teachers' activities along the lessons and that our models can predict the presence of the two most common teaching practices with over 80% of accuracy and good discriminative power. Finally, with these models, we found that using audio obtained from the teachers' smartphones it is also possible to automatically discriminate between sessions where students are using or not an online platform. This approach is important for teachers and other stakeholders who could use an automatic and cost-effective tool for analyzing teaching practices.