Hello.
I'm Azin Semsar from UMBC, presenting our paper,
"Quality of and Attention to Instructions in Telementoring."
Increased distributed workforce has
resulted in a great focus in both industry and research
to thus support and promote collaboration
through tele-instructional tools.
These tools incorporate three fundamental functionalities,
an audio connection, a video connection of the worker space
and some form of pointer to annotate on this short video.
However, few studies to this point
have found that, in most cases, a co-located condition
supersedes a distributed condition in terms
of performance and task outcome.
One explanation is that trainers in a co-located condition
provide more accurate instruction.
Another explanation is that local workers extensively
attend to pointing or visual instruction
as the primary source of information,
and ignores any simultaneous verbal instructions.
This results in misunderstandings and mistakes.
For that we conducted a systematic comparison
of instruction provision and perception parameters
in distributed and co-located collaborations.
Our study domain is surgical telementoring,
where an experienced surgeon remotely shares knowledge
to a less experienced local surgeon
in performing a laparoscopic surgery task.
In laparoscopic surgery, a long fiber optic camera
provides the surgeon with a view of the operating
field on a display.
This view is lively transferred to remote experts
to observe and advise accordingly.
So what did we do is that we conducted
a within-subject randomized experiment with two conditions,
co-located and distributed.
A total of 12 surgical trainees and one attending surgeon
as a trainer were recruited.
We collected audio, video, and laparoscopic recording.
Our measures included performance,
through questionnaires and task completion time,
quality of instruction, again through questionnaires,
and also the number of instructions
and pointing supplemental instructions.
Also attention to eye-tracking data such as fixation,
content fixation, and duration.
And we performed statistical analysis of linear mixed models
to compare measures between the two conditions.
What we found is that we identified
no statistical difference in performance between the two
conditions.
Surprisingly, the quality of instruction
was perceived significantly higher
in distributed conditions.
Specifically, trainees found the quality
of instruction pertaining to anatomical or object
identification higher in the distributed condition.
Our analysis of the instruction provision
showed that obtained higher quality of instruction
in distributed mentoring was not due to the quantity
of instructions provided, either visual or verbal,
as these numbers were not statistically
different between co-located and distributed conditions.
In analysis of our eye tracking data,
lower fixation rate and a longer fixation duration
revealed that trainees took a more efficient visual search
strategy in the distributed condition.
Analysis of eye movement [? around ?] the pointer
revealed trainees have an overall greater attention
to the pointer in the distributive condition,
especially while anatomical identification
instructions were provided.
Our main finding was that, in a distributed learning
environment, trainees change their behavior
to attend more to the provided instructions,
resulting in higher perceived quality of instruction.
In fact, trainees are more cautious
about the instructions, and particularly,
pointing instructions in telementoring.
This can be related to the media compensation theory that
says people try to compensate for their limitations
and unnaturalness of the media by changing their communication
behavior.
This suggests socio-technical implications
for supporting telementoring based on our findings.
First, the broader implication is
to support the telementoring with greater information
conveyed through the visual channel,
because the local workers are more
cautious toward visual information.
The pointer mostly facilitated the object identification
phase.
The socio-technical implication here
is to train the trainers to maximize the use of pointer
in object identification instructions.
The procedural instructions, such as orientation and hand
placements or showing trajectories,
need to be better supported by training the trainer
to use the drawing tool more effectively,
because the drawing tool is suggested
to be proper for procedural instructions.