Exploring an Affective and Responsive Virtual Environment to Improve Remote Learning

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The study is interesting in its focus, and below are some practical and some substantive recommendations that might be considered by the authors:

1. Not all references are made to the figure in the text. Sometimes the image is placed without a corresponding link in the text, which reduces clarity. I also do not consider it appropriate to start the text with a figure (before the introduction). I recommend placing references to figures, tables in the text at appropriate places and then placing these after the relevant reference in the text (not before). Otherwise it is very difficult to navigate the text and the reader may be confused or even misinterpret the data. 

2. I would have welcomed an elaboration of the description of zoom fatigue - the causes are described, but it is not specified what the authors mean by the term. 

3. In the case of the methodology, I would have liked more information about the survey itself - was quantitative and qualitative data collected, was only a questionnaire used or also an interview and if so, what kind? What was the content of the lessons - at least in terms of lesson structure? 

4. There are shortcomings in the text in terms of the English language - they are not of a fundamental nature, but they are recognizable even from the position of a non-native speaker. The language requires additional editing. 

5. The authors describe that three classes - angry, disgust and fear were less relevant, but do not explain why they were so evaluated, what were the criteria for evaluating relevance? 

6. I would recommend not using "we" in the formal level, but writing in er form. 

7. In the case of Figure 6 - is working with the category "Questions", but de facto these are not questions, but a form of assertion. I consider this to be problematic terminology. 

8. In the case of the lesson, were break-out rooms used in Zoom? I would really welcome more information about the organisation of the lessons as such. 

9. I don't know what the fault is, however, I see it as a major problem that the list of literature used is not included in the text, nor do I see it referenced in the running citations. This makes it difficult to evaluate self-citations, relevance of sources used, etc. This is in dire need of modification. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors propose a novel VR-based system that implies CAVE principles to enhance the teaching experience.

The idea seems promising, integrating an emotion recognition module and interactive features for the user. However, there are numerous problems in the manuscript, mainly in the presentation of the content.

The most relevant issue is related to the references: they are totally missing from the document.

The English language is often not correct. We strongly suggest the authors to totally revise the manuscript.

About the content, the idea seems weak in scientific soundness due to the lack of innovation in the algorithmic part of the work (e.g., the emotion recognition module is used as is). The only assembly of multiple already-made subparts could not be enough to prove the overall quality of the work. We invite the authors to highlight more the contribution they provided in this study, at least exploiting some well-known metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of the proposal with the collected answers from the participants.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

In a university setting, what types of opportunities can collaborative learning provide?

Are there any academic interests shared by the students who use the CUNY Affective and Responsive Virtual Environment CARVE Hub?

What kinds of sounds do you expect to hear in virtual or online classrooms?

Is it possible that someone's proclivity for spontaneous discourse and receptive involvement affects their ability to learn?

What are the possibilities that affective interaction will be employed if emotional data is not used?

How did we assess the children's emotional states using a complicated model that categorises people's emotions?

How CARVE Hub can produce reasonable results when dealing with authentic, webcam-captured faces.

The author should depict the flow graph to illustrate the need for the proposed approach.

The significant trends of the simulation results should show.

Comparison with recent studies and methods would be appreciated.

Introduction section can add the issues in the current work context and how proposed algorithms/approaches can overcome this.

Literature review techniques have to be strengthened by including the current system's issues and how the author proposes to overcome the same.

Clarify the finding Error rate and accuracy in the performance analysis section.

It is suggested to add the chart for the given process with a description.

The mapping process for the proposed technique should be discussed in detail.

Conclusion should state scope for future work.

Authors should add more information on the code's implementation to perform the analysis and the library involved in this task.

Authors should add the parameters of the process/method.

The paper does not clearly explain its advantages concerning the literature: the novelty and contributions of the proposed work are not clear: does it offer a new method? Or does the innovation only consists of the application?

The advantage of the proposed method concerning other ways in the literature should be clarified.

The paper does not provide critical experimental details needed to assess its contribution: What is the validation procedure correctly?

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The second version of the manuscript correct almost any issue highlighted in the first submission. However, there are still some minimal incorrect English style forms. Even if it is still not perfect, the paper could also be considered publishable as is.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your comments.

We conducted a thorough proofreading and revision of the English language throughout the paper.