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A new technology, called the Facial Action Coding System, has been developed by Professor Thomas Huang from the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science at the University of Illinois and Professor Nicu Sebe from the University of Amsterdam. This software can analyze a face and determine which emotions are displayed. It creates a map of the face from either a picture or scan and then determines which muscles and regions of the face are contracted. This information is then used to determine the exact percentages of emotion in the face. While this technology is incredible and definitely will have various areas of use, the classroom is not one of these areas as there are already more efficient and more cost-effective methods to determine a student's comprehension of a topic.

In schools today, this facial recognition and emotional analysis is already in use. As the author of "Making Mona Lisa Smile", Nick D'Alto, states, "[...] humans perform this same impressive 'calculation' every day" (D'Alto 5). While teachers teach lessons or assist an individual student, they can observe the student's face and can determine how the student is reacting to the material. A machine is not required to do this action, and it would cost much more than a teacher who can already perform the same task and teach the lesson accordingly.

Perhaps if both the teaching and facial analysis was done by a computer, then using this technology in online classrooms may be worthwhile. Dr. Huang predicts that "'A classroom computer could recognize when a student is becoming confused or bored,' [...] 'Then it could modify the lesson, like an effective human instructor'" (D'Alto 6). The problem with this solution is that there are already websites such as Khan Academy that teach the student and analyze their performance without the need for invasive methods such as constantly recording the student's face. Khan Academy simply asks students questions as it teaches or gives interactive activities that record the performance and help them see what they currently comprehend and what they need to review more. This method already functions very well and is personalized, therefore bringing in a new and more invasive performance analysis method into online learning is not necessary at all.

As if the previous two points were not enough, this new technology requires more computing power than your average household or school computer has. As D'Alto explains, "Your home PC can't handle the complex algorithms used to decode Mona Lisa's smile" (D'Alto 7). The implemenation of this software would require heavy upgrades to processing power in every computer that would be running it which would be incredibly expensive. Many schools and households do not have the money for this kind of large-scale upgrade to their computers. Moreover, this would be an expense with little benefit because everything this software is capable of can already be performed better, cheaper, and more efficiently by teachers and websites.

While this new software certainly is impressive, it simply is not necessary in the classroom. Human teachers can already analyze their students' emotions and interact with them directly, and existing learning websites such as Khan Academy analyize performance with questions and activities without being invasive to the students' privacy. Neither of these methods use the high processing power required to use this technology, and neither come with the significant cost of upgrades and other implementation fees. All in all, this innovation has no place in the classroom at this current time.

Score: 4